en-US Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:09:04 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 69711 A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveler, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place. Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm—that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.]]> 81 Jamaica Kincaid 0374527075 Bel 0 to-read 4.05 1988
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: Bel
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> 58730649 Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world.

Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by Fitzcarraldo Editions, New Directions (US) and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.]]> 99 Jessica Au 1913097765 Bel 0 to-read 3.79 2022
author: Jessica Au
name: Bel
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 22357838
Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.

An NYRB Classics Original]]> 262 Magda Szabó 1590177711 Bel 0 to-read 4.17 1987
author: Magda Szabó
name: Bel
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> 54614429 WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541349 Bel 0 to-read 3.89 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Bel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> 59468837
Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.]]> 239 Marlen Haushofer 0811231941 Bel 0 currently-reading 4.12 1963
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Bel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 7126 The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translation

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

Translated with an Introduction by Robin Buss

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Bel 0 to-read 4.29 1846
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Bel
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> 124029281 In Claudia Dey’s Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life—and art—of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.]]> 272 Claudia Dey 0374609705 Bel 0 to-read 3.93 2023
author: Claudia Dey
name: Bel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> 6439048 The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the straitened confines of her domestic situation.
Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work "quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity."
Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening. Now available in this inexpensive edition, it offers a powerful and provocative reading experience to modern readers.]]> 116 Kate Chopin Bel 0 to-read 3.54 1899
author: Kate Chopin
name: Bel
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1899
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> 28807242 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780099759911

Toni Morrison's debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family – Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola – in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.]]> 212 Toni Morrison Bel 0 4.11 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: Bel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/02
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]]> 31244 Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels.]]> 801 Charles Dickens 0375761144 Bel 0 to-read 4.08 1865
author: Charles Dickens
name: Bel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1865
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> 59149 Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.

Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of his barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder, yet one that will go on to destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.]]> 353 Stefan Zweig Bel 0 to-read 4.28 1939
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Bel
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> 915481 The Wedding?tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.? Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could?have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.

With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.]]> 256 Dorothy West 0385471440 Bel 0 to-read 3.98 1995
author: Dorothy West
name: Bel
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> 18521 A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.]]> 112 Virginia Woolf Bel 5 4.21 1929
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Bel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1929
rating: 5
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]]> 214152206 From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.

But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.]]> 464 Rebecca Romney 1982190248 Bel 0 to-read 4.47 2025
author: Rebecca Romney
name: Bel
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2025
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]]> 202102049 From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel’s end.?Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her German grandmother’s experience of the second world war, her aunt’s misery.?Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 288 Yōko Ogawa 0593316088 Bel 0 to-read 3.75 2006
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Bel
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> 62919394
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever-closer as the world around her unravels.

When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through a late-capitalist hellscape and offers an incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.]]> 288 Sarah Rose Etter 1668011638 Bel 0 to-read 3.60 2023
author: Sarah Rose Etter
name: Bel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> 52045757 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 144 Adania Shibli 191309717X Bel 0 to-read 4.26 2017
author: Adania Shibli
name: Bel
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 52892857 Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

“搁别补诲颈苍驳 The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.” —Tayari Jones

“The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” —Kiese Laymon]]> 287 Alice Walker 0143135694 Bel 5 favorites 4.40 1982
author: Alice Walker
name: Bel
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: favorites
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]]> 198385737
The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd ― spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist ― accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past ― riddled with grief and shame ― has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something ancient and beastly ― which she calls the grey dog ― is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory begins to fail. Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, and begins to wonder which is more dangerous: the grey dog, or herself.]]> 400 Elliott Gish 177041732X Bel 0 to-read 3.86 2024
author: Elliott Gish
name: Bel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Bel 4 4.32 1962
author: James Baldwin
name: Bel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
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]]> 62919847 A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida
June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.]]> 576 Tananarive Due 1982188340 Bel 0 to-read 4.44 2023
author: Tananarive Due
name: Bel
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 122892583 A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

A suspenseful new psychological thriller from the?Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted and?Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal and psychological suspense: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping among them.

“Refreshing, compelling and surprising.”—Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World]]> 332 Catherine Chidgey 1609459318 Bel 0 to-read 4.10 2023
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Bel
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
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]]> 199797848 A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction.

Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy.

When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet- and celebrity-obsessed world.]]> 352 Anna Dorn 1668047179 Bel 0 to-read 3.90 2024
author: Anna Dorn
name: Bel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
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]]> 59576076
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents?— neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.]]> 399 Tess Gunty Bel 0 to-read 3.50 2022
author: Tess Gunty
name: Bel
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczys?aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in?G?rbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczys?aw realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Bel 0 to-read 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Bel
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 214537791
“Brilliant … so alive and vibrating that it took my breath away.”—Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

Star point guard Mack Morris’s senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of Mack’s father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. Playing side by side for their high school basketball team, Mack and Liv discover an electrifying, game-winning chemistry on the court. Off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship—one that feels out-of-bounds in their small Pennsylvania town. Mack teeters on the precipice of adulthood as desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline. Caught between the dual impulses of ambition and self-destruction, Mack must decide what kind of life they want to fight for.

Written with the lush longing of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name,the obsessive attention of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl, and with all the romance and feeling of the beloved 2000 movie Love & Basketball, A Sharp Endless Need is a stunning testament to the big feelings of coming-of-age, falling in love, and, of course, playing sports.]]> 272 Marisa Crane 0593733649 Bel 0 to-read 4.23
author: Marisa Crane
name: Bel
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Bel 0 to-read 3.56 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Bel
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Bel 0 to-read 4.24 2021
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Bel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> 203982344 Esta es una historia real, llena de aristas y sombras, sobre la condición humana.

A fines de los sesenta, con trece a?os, la argentina Silvia Labayru era una adolescente tímida, lectora, amante de los animales, entusiasta de John F. Kennedy, hija de una familia de militares que incluía a su padre, miembro de la Fuerza Aérea y piloto civil. A esa edad ingresó en el Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires, una institución pública de gran prestigio, donde entró en contacto con agrupaciones estudiantiles de izquierda y se transformó en una militante aguerrida. En marzo de 1976 se produjo en la Argentina un golpe de Estado que dio comienzo a una dictadura militar. Para entonces, embarazada de cinco meses y con veinte a?os, Labayru integraba el sector de Inteligencia de la organización Montoneros, un grupo armado de extracción peronista. El 29 de diciembre de 1976 fue secuestrada por militares y trasladada a la ESMA, la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, donde funcionaba un centro de detención clandestino en el cual se torturó y asesinó a miles de personas. Allí tuvo a su hija que, una semana más tarde, fue entregada a los abuelos paternos. En la ESMA, Labayru fue torturada, obligada a realizar trabajo esclavo, violada reiteradamente por un oficial y forzada a representar el papel de hermana de Alfredo Astiz, un miembro de la Armada que se había infiltrado en la organización Madres de Plaza de Mayo, un operativo que terminó con tres Madres y dos monjas francesas desaparecidas. La liberaron en junio de 1978 y en el avión rumbo a Madrid, junto a su hija de un a?o y medio, pensó: ?Se acabó el infierno?. Pero el infierno no había terminado. Los argentinos en el exilio la repudiaron, acusándola de traidora a raíz de la desaparición de las Madres. Abominada por quienes habían sido sus compa?eros de militancia, arropada por unos pocos amigos fieles exiliados en Europa, hizo una vida. Hasta que en 2018 la contactó desde Buenos Aires un hombre que había sido su pareja en los a?os setenta y, en una secuencia en la que se funden manipulaciones familiares que torcieron el destino, comenzó a urdirse una historia que continúa hasta hoy.

La periodista Leila Guerriero comenzó a entrevistarla en 2021, mientras se esperaba la sentencia del primer juicio por crímenes de violencia sexual cometidos contra mujeres secuestradas durante la dictadura, en el que Labayru era denunciante. A lo largo de casi dos a?os, habló con sus amigos, sus exparejas, su pareja actual, sus hijos y sus compa?eros de cautiverio y de militancia. El resultado es el retrato de una mujer con una historia compleja en la que se amalgaman el amor, el sexo, la violencia, el humor, los hijos, los padres, la infidelidad, la política, los amigos, las mudanzas, y en la que sobrevuela una llamada telefónica que, realizada desde la ESMA el 14 de marzo de 1977, le salvó la vida.]]> 432 Leila Guerriero 8433922068 Bel 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Leila Guerriero
name: Bel
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> 214152402 A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1668058146 Bel 0 to-read 4.08 2025
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Bel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> 22039595 传递愿望、带来温暖……
任何奇怪的东西都能送到的魔女宅急便！

克里克城第二年的魔女生活中，琪琪接到了更多任务：有小孩要送「握手」给月亮公公、老爷爷请她带着自己的拐杖散步、帮忙「中心点不知去向病」的河马，还要学习魔女的传统药草……琪琪开始感到徬徨，她能克服新魔法带来的挑战吗？闭闭> 345 Eiko Kadono 4041008506 Bel 0 currently-reading 3.33 1993
author: Eiko Kadono
name: Bel
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 6282865
囚人たちの欲望が涡巻くデッドエンド尝翱痴贰。闭闭> 299 英田サキ 4199004084 Bel 0 4.24 2006
author: 英田サキ
name: Bel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
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]]> 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention…

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Bel 0 to-read 3.74 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: Bel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Bel 0 3.98 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Bel
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Bel 0 to-read 3.93 2024
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Bel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 32191710
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.]]> 223 Neil deGrasse Tyson 0393609391 Bel 0 to-read 4.07 2017
author: Neil deGrasse Tyson
name: Bel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59151
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.]]> 104 Stefan Zweig 1590171691 Bel 0 4.31 1942
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Bel
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 38633526
Our life is brief . . .

While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusual man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin.

As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins from Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Though she does not want to go to this unknown town or school, she also feels it’s the only place she should be. Against her mother’s wishes, Sasha leaves behind all that is familiar and begins her education.

As she quickly discovers, the institute’s "special technologies" are unlike anything she has ever encountered. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, their families pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.]]> 408 Marina Dyachenko 0062694596 Bel 0 to-read 4.00 2007
author: Marina Dyachenko
name: Bel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 157184735 From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.]]> 383 Mona Awad Bel 0 to-read 3.54 2023
author: Mona Awad
name: Bel
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]> 304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Bel 4 well this was an INSANE book 3.56 2021
author: Melissa Broder
name: Bel
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/17
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well this was an INSANE book
]]> 45806
"La tabla de Flandes" es un excitante juego de trampas e inversiones - pintura, musica, literatura y logica matematica, que se convierte para el lector en una peligrosa aventura.]]> 412 Arturo Pérez-Reverte 8497592654 Bel 0 to-read 3.88 1990
author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
name: Bel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34014636
Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.]]> 175 Joey Comeau 177041407X Bel 5 4.22 2017
author: Joey Comeau
name: Bel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
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So tender! I've been gravitating towards books that explore characters and their relationships, so this was right up my alley. I don't usually connect with narratives about grief but I loved the way this focused on the family rather than on the person dying, and every conversation felt so human I couldn't help but adore every character.
]]> 6218239
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?]]> 93 Lisa Tuttle 1902880900 Bel 0 to-read 3.88 2004
author: Lisa Tuttle
name: Bel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195660578
Surreal, darkly comic, and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix’s exuberant debut How It Works Out sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities.

What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?

How It Works Out follows the arc of Myriam and Allison’s relationship by running the couple through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.

Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a formally inventive, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.]]> 240 Myriam Lacroix 1419773518 Bel 0 to-read 3.68 2024
author: Myriam Lacroix
name: Bel
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> 588242 281 Manuel Puig Bel 0 to-read 3.99 1976
author: Manuel Puig
name: Bel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6277018
Una casa sin hombres y llena de mujeres, todas minusválidas, con alguna deformidad física, mental o imaginaria. Una ni?a de doce a?os condenada al olvido, o incluso a un destino más cruel, sale adelante y se convierte en una pintora famosa. Las mitologías del barrio, la familia, la sexualidad femenina y el ascenso social a través de la práctica de las Bellas Artes aparecen puestas en escena y desmenuzadas por la voz inconfundible de la narradora, Yuna, una primera persona que contempla el mundo con una mirada salvaje, a la vez cándida y brutal, perspicaz y ensimismada, y lo narra con una prosa que pone en peligro todas las convenciones del lenguaje literario.

A mitad de camino entre la autobiografía delirante y el ejercicio impúdico de la etnografía íntima, Las primas consagró a su autora, Aurora Venturini, como una de las narradoras más interesantes de la literatura argentina contemporánea.]]> 168 Aurora Venturini Bel 0 to-read 4.21 2007
author: Aurora Venturini
name: Bel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Bel 0 to-read 3.73 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Bel
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216563981 Hunger devours.
Takeaway food and human flesh. Sexual humiliation or humanity's survival. Smooth, unblemished skin.

It cannot be sated.
But people try. They push eager hands into their own gaping injuries. They suck the blood of rabbits and other people. They buy from a restaurant that only serves food they didn't order. They do everything the song from the ocean demands.

This outstanding first collection cements Eliza Clark's place as one of the UK's most extraordinary voices. Its ten dark, visceral stories range from urban teenage fantasies to dystopian, each bursting with unexpected and insatiable intruders into bodies, communities and ecosystems - both deeply desired and violently resisted.]]> 225 Eliza Clark 0571371817 Bel 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Eliza Clark
name: Bel
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/14
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]]> 190372 544 Helen DeWitt 0786887001 Bel 0 to-read 4.12 2000
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Bel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 26144503
ブラック公司にこき使われて心身共に衰弱した隆は、无意识に线路に飞び込もうとしたところを「ヤマモト」と名乗る男に助けられた。
同级生を自称する彼に心を开き、何かと助けてもらう隆だが、本物の同级生は海外滞在中ということがわかる。
なぜ赤の他人をここまで気にかけてくれるのか? 気になった隆は、彼の名前で個人情報をネット検索するが、出てきたのは、三年前に激務で鬱になり自殺した男のニュースだった――
働く人ならみんな共感! スカっとできて最後は泣ける"すべての働く人たちに贈る、人生応援ストーリー"]]> 258 Emi Kitagawa 4048692712 Bel 3 3.93 2015
author: Emi Kitagawa
name: Bel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
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]]> 57378289 312 Amanda R. Woomer 9798713354 Bel 0 to-read 4.16
author: Amanda R. Woomer
name: Bel
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1713426
Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?

Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?

And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?

When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same "types" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us "predictably" irrational.

From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. "Predictably Irrational" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.]]> 247 Dan Ariely Bel 0 to-read 4.12 2008
author: Dan Ariely
name: Bel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29461334 For the Japanese paperback, see: ISBN13: 9784575521252.

デビュー作にして25万部を超えるベストセラーとなった「君の膵臓（すいぞう）をたべたい」の着者が赠る、待望の最新作。友达のいない少女、リストカットを繰り返す女子高生、アバズレと骂られる女、一人静かに余生を送る老婆。彼女たちの“幸せ”は、どこにあるのか。「やり直したい」ことがある、“今”がうまくいかない全ての人たちに送る物语。闭闭> 264 Yoru Sumino 4575239453 Bel 4 4.10 2016
author: Yoru Sumino
name: Bel
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> 58045504 An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.]]> 480 Evelyn Waugh 0141182482 Bel 0 to-read 4.04 1945
author: Evelyn Waugh
name: Bel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/28
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Bel 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Bel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123220515 From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.”

As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.”

Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.

In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.

In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy]]> 500 Alba de Céspedes 1662601433 Bel 0 to-read 4.18 1949
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: Bel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/17
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]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Bel 0 to-read 3.89 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Bel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Bel 0 to-read 4.16 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Bel
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/08
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]]> 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Bel 3 3.85
author: Carys Davies
name: Bel
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> 75582270
Not fully understanding her own reasons for going back to the place where she once lived and raised a family, and that she had been determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps her return is nothing more than a little luck…]]> 211 Claudia Pi?eiro 1913867552 Bel 0 to-read 4.31 2015
author: Claudia Pi?eiro
name: Bel
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> 129223
Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents—a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions.

The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.]]> 448 Radclyffe Hall Bel 0 to-read 3.74 1928
author: Radclyffe Hall
name: Bel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62888191 A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]> 336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638930368 Bel 2 4.12 2023
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Bel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/04
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]]> 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X Bel 0 to-read 4.02 2023
author: Henry Hoke
name: Bel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Bel 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Bel
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/03
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]]> 19634 Birds of America we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
?
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.]]> 147 Lorrie Moore 1400033829 Bel 0 to-read 3.84 1994
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Bel
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56160395
If she's being honest, Sammie Lucas is scared of her son. Working from home in the close quarters of their Florida house, she lives with one wary eye peeled on Samson, a sullen, unknowable boy who resists her every attempt to bond with him. Uncertain in her own feelings about motherhood, she tries her best—driving, cleaning, cooking, prodding him to finish projects for school—while growing increasingly resentful of Monika, her confident but absent wife. As Samson grows from feral toddler to surly teenager, Sammie's life begins to deteriorate into a mess of unruly behavior, and her struggle to create a picture-perfect queer family unravels. When her son's hostility finally spills over into physical aggression, Sammie must confront her role in the mess—and the possibility that it will never be clean again.

Blending the warmth and wit of Arnett's breakout hit, Mostly Dead Things, with a candid take on queer family dynamics, With Teeth is a thought-provoking portrait of the delicate fabric of family—and the many ways it can be torn apart.]]> 304 Kristen Arnett 0593191501 Bel 0 to-read 3.49 2021
author: Kristen Arnett
name: Bel
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58214328 A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.

"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.]]> 352 Stephanie Foo 0593238109 Bel 5 4.50 2022
author: Stephanie Foo
name: Bel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
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Incredible. I cried so many times while reading. This taught me so much about myself, about the world, about pain and about love. It's so well-researched but also so vulnerable and emotional. I just wanna go out and hug all my friends and family and heal and be better so . YEAH
]]> 49011 126 Angela Carter 014017821X Bel 0 to-read 3.96 1979
author: Angela Carter
name: Bel
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 Bel 0 to-read 3.81 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Bel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28818761
"Raucous . . . [and] unapologetically raw."—New York Times

It's 1999 in San Francisco, and as shockwaves of gentrification sweep through Michelle's formerly scruffy neighborhood, money troubles, drug-fueled mishaps, and a string of disastrous affairs send her into a tailspin. Desperate to save herself, Michelle sets out to seek a fresh start in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, climate-related disruptions and a string of extinctions are the background noise of impending doom. One day, Michelle wakes up to an official announcement: the world will be ending in exactly one year. Daily life in Los Angeles quickly becomes intensely surreal.

Humans begin to collectively dream of the lives and loves they would have had, if not for the end of the world, and the lines between fantasy and reality become increasingly blurred. As the planet nears its expiration date, Michelle holes up in an abandoned bookstore and calmly begins to write—convinced she's finally stumbled upon the elusive "universal story"—a novel about a struggling writer facing the end of the world.

Funny, gritty, improbable, and endearing, Black Wave muses on the hallucinatory confusions of addiction, the hope and despair of a barely published writer, notions of destiny, and the porous boundaries between memoir and fiction.

Michelle Tea has published four memoirs, including the award-winning Valencia; the novel Rose of No Man's Land; and the poetry collection The Beautiful. Her latest book How to Grow Up: A Memoir, was recently published by Plume.]]> 326 Michelle Tea 1558619399 Bel 0 to-read 3.88 2016
author: Michelle Tea
name: Bel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 33376821
Until, that is, Tokue comes into his life. An elderly woman with disfigured hands and a troubled past, she makes the best sweet bean paste Sentaro has ever tasted. The unlikeliest of friendships blossoms, but it will take all of their resolve – and plenty of pancakes – to protect themselves when Tokue's dark secret comes to light.]]> 216 Durian Sukegawa 1786071959 Bel 0 to-read 4.07 2013
author: Durian Sukegawa
name: Bel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61273768
Ranita Atwater is “getting short.”

She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children.

My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival.

Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life.

Perfect or fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.]]> 352 Helen Elaine Lee 1982171898 Bel 0 to-read 3.96 2023
author: Helen Elaine Lee
name: Bel
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58090794 304 Karl Geary 1646221133 Bel 2 4.12 2023
author: Karl Geary
name: Bel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/06/30
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]]> 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Bel 0 to-read 4.35 1965
author: John Williams
name: Bel
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195790706 A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.]]> 288 Thomas Grattan 0374608180 Bel 0 to-read 3.93 2024
author: Thomas Grattan
name: Bel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin Bel 0 to-read 4.11 1969
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Bel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Bel 0 to-read 4.16 2020
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Bel
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Bel 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Bel
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 206236
This novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. Art Montana is an obsessive DEA agent. The Barrera brothers are heirs to a drug empire. Nora Hayden is a jaded teenager who becomes a high-class hooker. Father Parada is a powerful and incorruptible Catholic priest. Callan is an Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen who grows up to be a merciless hitman. And they are all trapped in the world of the Mexican drug Federaci. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you’ve never seen it.]]> 542 Don Winslow 1400096936 Bel 0 to-read 4.36 2005
author: Don Winslow
name: Bel
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey Bel 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Bel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 40245700 In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted…

Bold and fearless, Nina Markova always dreamed of flying. When the Nazis attack the Soviet Union, she risks everything to join the legendary Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment wreaking havoc on the invading Germans. When she is stranded behind enemy lines, Nina becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress, and only Nina’s bravery and cunning will keep her alive.

Transformed by the horrors he witnessed from Omaha Beach to the Nuremberg Trials, British war correspondent Ian Graham has become a Nazi hunter. Yet one target eludes him: a vicious predator known as the Huntress. To find her, the fierce, disciplined investigator joins forces with the only witness to escape the Huntress alive: the brazen, cocksure Nina. But a shared secret could derail their mission unless Ian and Nina force themselves to confront it.

Growing up in post-war Boston, seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride is determined to become a photographer. When her long-widowed father unexpectedly comes homes with a new fiancée, Jordan is thrilled. But there is something disconcerting about the soft-spoken German widow. Certain that danger is lurking, Jordan begins to delve into her new stepmother’s past—only to discover that there are mysteries buried deep in her family . . . secrets that may threaten all Jordan holds dear.

In this immersive, heart-wrenching story, Kate Quinn illuminates the consequences of war on individual lives, and the price we pay to seek justice and truth.]]> 560 Kate Quinn Bel 0 to-read 4.32 2019
author: Kate Quinn
name: Bel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58433168 Marie, an Algonquin woman of the Weskarini Deer Clan, lost her first husband and her children to an Iroquois raid. In the aftermath of another lethal attack, her chief begs her to remarry for the sake of the clan. Marie is a healer who honours the ways of her people, and Pierre, the green-eyed ex-soldier from France who wants her for his bride, is not the man she would choose. But her people are dwindling, wracked by white men's diseases and nearly starving every winter as the game retreats away from the white settlements. If her chief believes such a marriage will cement their alliance with the French against the Iroquois and the British, she feels she has no choice. Though she does it reluctantly, and with some fear--Marie is trading the memory of the man she loved for a man she doesn't understand at all, and whose devout Catholicism blinds him to the ways of her people.

This beautiful, powerful novel brings to life women who have literally fallen through the cracks of settler histories. Especially Jeanne, the first child born of the new marriage, neither white nor Weskarini, but caught between worlds. As she reaches adolescence, it becomes clear she is two-spirited. In her mother's culture, she would have been considered blessed, her nature a sign of special wisdom. But to the settlers of New France, and even to her own father, Jeanne is unnatural, sinful--a woman to be shunned, and worse.

And so, with the poignant story of Jeanne, Danielle Daniel imagines her way into the heart and mind of a woman at the origin of the long history of violence against Indigenous women and the deliberate, equally violent, disruption of First Nations culture--opening a door long jammed shut, so all of us can enter.]]> 327 Danielle Daniel 0735282080 Bel 0 to-read 4.43 2022
author: Danielle Daniel
name: Bel
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37570546 From a psychotherapist, and national advice columnist comes a thought-provoking new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world -- where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.]]> 415 Lori Gottlieb 1328662055 Bel 0 to-read 4.36 2019
author: Lori Gottlieb
name: Bel
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Bel 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Coco Mellors
name: Bel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52964846 After all, there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you're lucky.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.

From the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole comes a powerful new novel about an unlikely friendship between a young man and an older woman, set in the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay in the aftermath of the Second World War.]]> 261 Benjamin Myers 1526611309 Bel 0 to-read 4.19 2019
author: Benjamin Myers
name: Bel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58739425
Until he can't. Ben is in some ways Ronny's opposite; he's big and solid where Ronny is small and slight. Ben's at UNC on a football scholarship. Confident, with that easy jock swagger, and an explosive temper always simmering. He has a steady stream of girlfriends. Ben's aware of the overwhelming effect he has on Ronny. It's like a sensation of power. So easy to tease Ronny, throw playful insults, but it all feels somehow.loaded.

Meanwhile Ronny's mother has moved to Vegas with her latest husband. And Ben's mother is fighting advanced cancer. A bubble forms around the two, as surprising to Ronny as it is to Ben. Within it their connection ignites physically and emotionally. But what will happen when the tensile strength of a bubble is tested? When the rest of life intervenes?

The Dove in the Belly is about the electric, dangerous, sometimes tender but always powerful attraction between two very different boys. But it's also about the full cycles of love and life and how they open in us the twinned capacities for grief and joy.]]> 336 Jim Grimsley 1646141318 Bel 0 to-read 4.13 2022
author: Jim Grimsley
name: Bel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 179546799
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 400 Alice Winn 0593467841 Bel 5 favorites 4.54 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: Bel
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: favorites
review:
A story about war. A story about love. A story about how to keep one alive when the other has destroyed everything in its path. Such a bleak read, but filled with tenderness.
]]> 75715117 Selected as an Evening Standard 'one to watch in 2023'

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.

Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.]]> 288 Chloe Michelle Howarth 0857308416 Bel 0 to-read 4.33 2023
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: Bel
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Bel 5 What can I say? Elena Ferrante’s writing is so succinct and to the point that she can talk about the worst atrocities in a woman’s life in simple terms and very short chapters. That is not to say her writing is not evocative; it’s easy to get lost in her books, it seems like the pages turn themselves as your read about everything from marital rape to infidelity to a woman who dreamed of becoming somebody setting the first and only book she ever wrote in flames. I teared up so many times during this: the characters may make questionable choices at times, but I feel like they are so well written that everything they do makes sense to who they are what they’ve been through. Lila and Lenù both pissed me off countless times, but they are such compelling characters that all you want is for them to get the better of their circumstances and just be happy. Their relationship is way more complicated in this book, and yet it’s even more clear how much these women changed together and how much they mean to each other. And mostly, how interchangeable their situations may have been if only one of them hadn’t been poorer and thus forced to marry at 16. Lila, you deserved so much more.

As always, so many interesting insights into what it means to be a lower-class woman, without autonomy over her own body. So good!!!!]]> 4.47 2012
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Bel
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves:
review:
4.5
What can I say? Elena Ferrante’s writing is so succinct and to the point that she can talk about the worst atrocities in a woman’s life in simple terms and very short chapters. That is not to say her writing is not evocative; it’s easy to get lost in her books, it seems like the pages turn themselves as your read about everything from marital rape to infidelity to a woman who dreamed of becoming somebody setting the first and only book she ever wrote in flames. I teared up so many times during this: the characters may make questionable choices at times, but I feel like they are so well written that everything they do makes sense to who they are what they’ve been through. Lila and Lenù both pissed me off countless times, but they are such compelling characters that all you want is for them to get the better of their circumstances and just be happy. Their relationship is way more complicated in this book, and yet it’s even more clear how much these women changed together and how much they mean to each other. And mostly, how interchangeable their situations may have been if only one of them hadn’t been poorer and thus forced to marry at 16. Lila, you deserved so much more.

As always, so many interesting insights into what it means to be a lower-class woman, without autonomy over her own body. So good!!!!
]]> 62898932 Do you know what happened already?
Did you know her?
Did you see it on the internet?
Did you listen to a podcast?
Did the hosts make jokes?

Did you see the pictures of the body?

Did you look for them?

It's been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.

That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

The only question is: how much of it is true?]]> 336 Eliza Clark 0571371795 Bel 4 3.87 2023
author: Eliza Clark
name: Bel
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves:
review:
Just realized I completely forgot to rate this and it's been way too long now but... I had a blast! I remember enjoying this a lot, but I was also somewhat scared? Reading about murderers late at night sure took its toll on me at certain points, and I had to stop and take a break. More than anything I liked how this book forces you to look at your own morbid interest in "true crime" and what that means in the grand scheme of things. I think my only problem with it was the writing: it seemed too cartoonish with its portrayal of teenage girls at times, but I do understand that this is written as if a middle-aged male journalist wrote it, so it makes sense. Also love the acknowledgment of bias and unreliable narration at the end: is anything we read even true, or is it just another subjective and flawed view of the facts by an outsider?
]]> 9593 骋补濒á辫补驳辞蝉 takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the 骋补濒á辫补驳辞蝉 Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry—and all that is worth saving.]]> 324 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0385333870 Bel 0 to-read 3.89 1985
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Bel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9214995 The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.]]> 310 Lidia Yuknavitch 0979018838 Bel 0 to-read 4.24 2011
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Bel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 278232 S. reveals one of the most horrifying aspects of any war: the rape and torture of civilian women by occupying forces. S. is the story of a Bosnian woman in exile who has just given birth to an unwanted child—one without a country, a name, a father, or a language. Its birth only reminds her of an even more grueling experience: being repeatedly raped by Serbian soldiers in the "women's room" of a prison camp. Through a series of flashbacks, S. relives the unspeakable crimes she has endured, and in telling her story—timely, strangely compelling, and ultimately about survival—depicts the darkest side of human nature during wartime. "S. may very well be one of the strongest books about war you will ever read. . . .The writing is taut, precise, and masterful."]]> 220 Slavenka Drakuli? 0140298444 Bel 5 4.26 1999
author: Slavenka Drakuli?
name: Bel
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves:
review:
It's difficult to rate a book like this. It recounts so many horrors that I can't say I enjoyed reading it, and yet I think everyone should read a book like this in their lives. It talks about the monstrosities of war, but sprinkled throughout are moments of beauty, too, like a group of women being each other's support, the smell of baked bread, the memories of your family, of home, and the conviction that out of all that hatred, love must be born.
]]> 41104077
Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women?, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.]]> 448 Caroline Criado Pérez 1419729071 Bel 0 to-read 4.35 2019
author: Caroline Criado Pérez
name: Bel
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195888551
Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger felt a new urgency in her devotion to the women in her life—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.

Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairytales to true crime, from Ana?s Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the “sad girls” of Tumblr—Dancyger’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.

Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.]]> 224 Lilly Dancyger 0593447573 Bel 0 to-read 3.90 2024
author: Lilly Dancyger
name: Bel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33233984
美貌の新進俳優と、崇拝するキモウザ青年の青春を描く大人気シリーズ、待望の続編! !
【础尘补锄辞苍闯笔数量限定】书き下ろしショートストーリーペーパー付き。

※This edition is not sale now.]]> 313 Yuu Nagira 4199008675 Bel 3
ANYWAY second japanese book I read this year, let's go girls!!!!!!!!!!!]]> 4.20 2016
author: Yuu Nagira
name: Bel
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/28
shelves:
review:
It might be me just losing interest but I think this suffers from the typical romance-novel-sequel issue: now that the couple are together there's nothing interesting keeping the plot going so we are gonna have to make them fight over stupid shit. Enter my favorite (not) trope, miscommunication! Or in this case, just lack of communication. I get that Kiyoi being unable to express what he wants/needs is kind of a main plot here but the amount of times Hira said some fucked up shit in the middle of a romantic moment and Kiyoi got angry and then the scene just ended and something else happened... I don't know, it just kinda lost me, especially because I didn't really care about the side characters like Ana and Noguchi. I just think the development for both Kiyoi and Hira was too little too late for me, but I did awe a bit at the ending what can i say........

ANYWAY second japanese book I read this year, let's go girls!!!!!!!!!!!
]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Bel 0 to-read 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Bel
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24531375 53 Nobuko Yoshiya Bel 0 to-read 3.60 2015
author: Nobuko Yoshiya
name: Bel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 157455 88 James Baldwin 3125765005 Bel 0 to-read 4.32 1957
author: James Baldwin
name: Bel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59721793 A magnetic tale of betrayal, art, and ambition, set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, and present-day Los Angeles

Carlisle Martin dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer just like her mother, Isabel, a former Balanchine ballerina. Since they live in Ohio, she only gets to see her father Robert for a few precious weeks a year when she visits Greenwich Village, where he lives in an enchanting apartment on Bank Street with his partner, James.

Brilliant but troubled, James gives Carlisle an education in all that he holds dear in life--literature, music, and most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and the sophistication of their lives, Carlisle's aspiration to become a dancer herself blooms, born of her desire to be asked to stay at Bank Street, to be included in Robert and James' world even as AIDS brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair creates a rift between them, with devastating consequences that reverberate for decades to come.

Nineteen years later, Carlisle receives a phone call which unravels the fateful events of her life, causing her to see with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she's become. They're Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.]]> 288 Meg Howrey 038554877X Bel 0 to-read 4.07 2022
author: Meg Howrey
name: Bel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>