Joanne's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 05:55:24 -0700 60 Joanne's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Creation Lake 220160270 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116536 Joanne 0 to-read 2.88 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Joanne
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> The God of the Woods 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 Joanne 0 to-read 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.15
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Joanne 0 to-read 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Joanne 5 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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]]> The God of Small Things 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Joanne 0 currently-reading 3.97 1997 The God of Small Things
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> Abundance 176444106 Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic from climate change to housing, education to healthcare.

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.]]> 304 Ezra Klein 1668023482 Joanne 4 4.11 2025 Abundance
author: Ezra Klein
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood Joanne 0 to-read 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter—and What Really Does]]> 216419789 How college faculty and staff can help students "hack" their college experience through a proactive, personalized approach to success.

College is a complex, high-stakes game, according to authors Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson, but students can learn how to win it. Hacking College offers college advisors, faculty, and staff in student and academic affairs a groundbreaking guide to rethinking higher education so that students can succeed in an increasingly complex world. Drawing from extensive research and real student experiences, this essential book exposes the hidden challenges and bureaucratic traps that undermine student success, from convoluted transfer processes to a single-minded emphasis on majors.

Each chapter provides actionable strategies to help advisors lead students to tailor their education to their aspirations. Through vivid case studies, Laff and Carlson advocate for a proactive approach to education—encouraging students to "hack" their college experience by crafting a personalized field of study. This method challenges the traditional focus on declaring a major and empowers students to link their personal interests with academic pursuits so that their education aligns with future career and life goals.

Enriched with insights on how to find underutilized institutional resources and foster meaningful mentor relationships, Hacking College encourages students, educators, and institutions to transform passive educational experiences into dynamic journeys of discovery and self-fulfillment.]]> 238 Ned Scott Laff 1421450763 Joanne 4 4.60 Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter—and What Really Does
author: Ned Scott Laff
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.60
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rating: 4
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]]> Creation Lake 207595731
“Sadie Smith� is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.]]> 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116544 Joanne 0 to-read 3.59 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> Tom Lake 216038747 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 320 Ann Patchett 0063327538 Joanne 0 to-read 3.83 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind]]> 1891102
On How to Meditate with Pema Chödrön, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and bestselling author presents her first complete spoken-word course for those new to meditation.

Through traditional insights and her personal guidance, offered in 12 sitting sessions, Pema Chödrön will help you honestly meet and compassionately relate with your mind as you explore:

The basics of mindfulness awareness practice, from proper posture to learning to settle to breathing and relaxation
- Gentleness, patience, and humor--three ingredients for a well-balanced practice
- Shamatha (or calm abiding), the art of stabilizing the mind to remain present with whatever arises
- Thoughts and emotions as "sheer delight"--instead of obstacles--in meditation
"From my own experience and from listening to many people over the years, I've tried to offer here what I feel are the essential points of meditation," explains Pema Chödrön. Now this beloved voice shares with you her accessible approach--simple and down-to-earth while informed by the highest traditions of Tibetan Buddhism--on How to Meditate with Pema Chödrön.

Running time: 5 hours, 45 minutes on 5 audio CDs]]> 345 Pema Chödrön 1591797942 Joanne 0 currently-reading 4.05 How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind
author: Pema Chödrön
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.05
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy]]> 42771901 232 Jenny Odell 1612197493 Joanne 4 3.68 2019 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
author: Jenny Odell
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
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Definitely not an easy read, but very worthwhile. Can’t remember the last time I read a book that made me think so much. I read it with a pencil in my hand and a tin of book darts by my side for marking the pages and passages that made me go “hmm.� HTDN has without a doubt impacted the way I interact with media and with my environment.
]]> Dream Count 219520778 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593802721 Joanne 0 to-read 3.92 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> Why We're Polarized 52098718
Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, it offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Donald Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.]]> 336 Ezra Klein 147670032X Joanne 0 to-read 4.19 2020 Why We're Polarized
author: Ezra Klein
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> The Genius of Birds 25938481
As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures.]]> 352 Jennifer Ackerman 1594205213 Joanne 0 to-read 4.03 2016 The Genius of Birds
author: Jennifer Ackerman
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Black Woods Blue Sky 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Joanne 0 to-read 3.69 2025 Black Woods Blue Sky
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> The Antidote 214537790 From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Joanne 0 to-read 4.00 2025 The Antidote
author: Karen Russell
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
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]]> Everything I Never Told You 18693763
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue - in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting.

When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to make someone accountable, no matter what the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is convinced that local bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who observes far more than anyone realises and who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

Everything I Never Told You is a gripping page-turner, about secrets, love, longing, lies and race.

Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.]]> 297 Celeste Ng 159420571X Joanne 0 3.81 2014 Everything I Never Told You
author: Celeste Ng
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> Little Fires Everywhere 44177149 From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224315 Joanne 4 4.07 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
author: Celeste Ng
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> Yellowface 213562784
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 322 R.F. Kuang 0063250853 Joanne 0 to-read 3.80 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)]]> 77566 500 Dan Simmons 0553283685 Joanne 0 to-read 4.26 1989 Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)
author: Dan Simmons
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us]]> 211004927 What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions—as well as the common ground—between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it’s also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000—when many people reacted to Boylan’s transition with love—and the present era of blowback and fear.

How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose—and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all.

With Boylan’s trademark humor and poignancy, Cleavage is a sharp, witty, and captivating look at the triumphs and losses of a life lived in two genders. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.]]> 256 Jennifer Finney Boylan 1250261880 Joanne 0 to-read 3.75 2025 Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us
author: Jennifer Finney Boylan
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Joanne 4 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/02
date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Joanne 0 to-read 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]> 310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Joanne 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood
author: Lucy Jones
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Piranesi 52702097
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 246 Susanna Clarke Joanne 5 favorites 4.24 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/08
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:
I just updated this to 5 stars, because two years later, I still find myself thinking about this book.
]]> <![CDATA[Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1)]]> 37442 When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

]]> 406 Gregory Maguire 0060987103 Joanne 4 want-to-re-read 3.52 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1)
author: Gregory Maguire
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 Joanne 5 favorites 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:
I loved this book. I loved the writing. I loved the characters. I loved the intellectualism without pretense (Definitely some pretentious characters, but never pretentious writing). I loved the dry humor. I chuckled out loud all the way through, occasionally even snorted (which was a little awkward when reading in public). I now have a book hangover (which, I’ve decided, for me, is the best indicator that a book deserves a 5 star review). Adding this to my list of all-time favorite reads. Thank you, Elif Batuman; I wish I could write like you.
]]> <![CDATA[Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]]> 8520610 The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. 

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.]]> 333 Susan Cain 0307352145 Joanne 5 favorites 4.07 2012 Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
author: Susan Cain
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> When You Reach Me 5310515 199 Rebecca Stead 0385737424 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.08 2009 When You Reach Me
author: Rebecca Stead
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2018/05/07
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:
I read this book with my older son a while back, and just finished reading it again with the 9 year old. They were both completely entranced by it. In fact, the 14 year old sat in for the second reading. It’s such a unique story.
]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Joanne 5 favorites 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:
Devastating. Also one of the best books I’ve ever read. Six months later still thinking about it.
]]> <![CDATA[Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail]]> 12262741 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State � and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.]]> 336 Cheryl Strayed 0307592731 Joanne 5 favorites 4.06 2012 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
author: Cheryl Strayed
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2016/02/18
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Night Circus 9361589
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.]]> 506 Erin Morgenstern Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 4.00 2011 The Night Circus
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2012/06/22
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:
I loved this book. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again,
]]> <![CDATA[Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times]]> 52623750 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593189481.

An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.]]> 241 Katherine May Joanne 5 favorites 3.82 2020 Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
author: Katherine May
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:
This is a personal 5â­ď¸Źs. It may not be for you. I read this book in December of a very long year. It’s undeniably winter here. So it benefits a lot from right time/ right place. This is a book I wish I wrote. I’ll probably carry it with me for the rest of my days.
]]> <![CDATA[Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen]]> 7012577 The astonishing national bestseller and hugely entertaining story that completely changed the way we run.

An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?

Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America's best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall's incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.]]> 287 Christopher McDougall Joanne 5 favorites 4.36 2009 Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
author: Christopher McDougall
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 14201
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 3.84 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Joanne 5 favorites, want-to-re-read 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites, want-to-re-read
review:

]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Little Women (Little Women, #1)]]> 1934 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780451529305.

Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,� including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book� her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

]]> 449 Louisa May Alcott Joanne 5 favorites 4.16 1868 Little Women (Little Women, #1)
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1868
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Joanne 5 favorites 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> The Little Prince 157993
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince, presented here in a stunning new translation with carefully restored artwork. The definitive edition of a worldwide classic, it will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.]]> 96 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0152023984 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.32 1943 The Little Prince
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass]]> 24213
When Alice sees a white rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat pocket she decides to follow it, and a sequence of most unusual events is set in motion. This mini book contains the entire topsy-turvy stories of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, accompanied by practical notes and Martina Pelouso's memorable full-colour illustrations.]]> 239 Lewis Carroll Joanne 5 favorites 4.07 1871 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
author: Lewis Carroll
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1871
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> The Time Traveler's Wife 18619684 537 Audrey Niffenegger 1939126010 Joanne 5 favorites 4.07 2003 The Time Traveler's Wife
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> The Phantom Tollbooth 378 Librarian's Note: For an alternate cover edition of the same ISBN, click here.

This beloved story -first published more than fifty years ago- introduces readers to Milo and his adventures in the Lands Beyond.

For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason! Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams. . . .]]> 248 Norton Juster 0394820371 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.19 1961 The Phantom Tollbooth
author: Norton Juster
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> A Prayer for Owen Meany 4473 637 John Irving 0552135399 Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 4.24 1989 A Prayer for Owen Meany
author: John Irving
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> The Year of Magical Thinking 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Joanne 5 favorites 3.94 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie-the-Pooh, #2)]]> 776407 180 A.A. Milne 0525444440 Joanne 5 favorites, kiddos 4.37 1928 The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie-the-Pooh, #2)
author: A.A. Milne
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites, kiddos
review:

]]> The Velveteen Rabbit 144974
Like the Skin Horse, Margery Williams understood how toys—and people—become real through the wisdom and experience of love. This reissue of a favorite classic, with the original story and illustrations as they first appeared in 1922, will work its magic for all who read it.]]> 40 Margery Williams Bianco 0380002558 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.30 1922 The Velveteen Rabbit
author: Margery Williams Bianco
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> The Tale of Despereaux 37190 A brave mouse, a covetous rat, a wishful serving girl, and a princess named Pea come together in Kate DiCamillo's Newbery Medal–winning tale.

Welcome to the story of Despereaux Tilling, a mouse who is in love with music, stories, and a princess named Pea. It is also the story of a rat called Roscuro, who lives in the darkness and covets a world filled with light. And it is the story of Miggery Sow, a slow-witted serving girl who harbors a simple, impossible wish. These three characters are about to embark on a journey that will lead them down into a horrible dungeon, up into a glittering castle, and, ultimately, into each other's lives. What happens then? As Kate DiCamillo would say: Reader, it is your destiny to find out.]]> 272 Kate DiCamillo 0763625299 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.07 2003 The Tale of Despereaux
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> Never Let Me Go 6334 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Joanne 5 favorites 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/11
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler]]> 371136 Claudia was a good organizer and Jamie bad some ideas, too; so the two took up residence at the museum right on schedule. But once the fun of settling in was over, Claudia had two unexpected problems: She felt just the same, and she wanted to feel different; and she found a statue at the Museum so beautiful she could not go home until she bad discovered its maker, a question that baffled the experts, too.

The former owner of the statue was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Without her-well, without her, Claudia might never have found a way to go home.

]]> 172 E.L. Konigsburg 0689711816 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.23 1967 From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
author: E.L. Konigsburg
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> Geek Love 13872 Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out � with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes � to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious � and dangerous � asset.

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.]]> 348 Katherine Dunn 0375713344 Joanne 5 favorites 3.96 1989 Geek Love
author: Katherine Dunn
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Watership Down 12147 476 Richard Adams Joanne 5 favorites 4.17 1972 Watership Down
author: Richard Adams
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Middlesex 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Joanne 5 favorites 4.03 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]> 311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X Joanne 5 favorites 4.15 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/03
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Wind in the Willows 8504009 “All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.�

For more than a century, The Wind in the Willows and its endearing protagonists—Mole, Water Rat, Badger, and, of course, the incorrigible Toad—have enchanted children of all ages. Whether the four friends are setting forth on an exciting adventure, engaging in a comic caper, or simply relaxing by the River Thames, their stories will surprise and captivate you.

Hailed as one of the most enduringly popular works of the twentieth century, this story is a classic of magical fancy and enchanting wit. Penned in lyrical prose, the adventures and misadventures of the book’s intrepid quartet of heroes raise fantasy to the level of myth. Reflecting the freshness of childhood wonder, it still offers adults endless sophistication, substance, and depth.

The animals� world embodies the author’s wry, whimsical, and unfailingly inventive imagination. It is a world that succeeding generations of both adult and young readers have found irresistible. But why say more? To use the words of the estimable Mr. Toad himself: “Travel, change, interest, excitement!...Come inside.�]]> 183 Kenneth Grahame Joanne 5 kiddos 4.21 1908 The Wind in the Willows
author: Kenneth Grahame
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1908
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> Still Life with Woodpecker 9566 277 Tom Robbins 184243022X Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 4.05 1980 Still Life with Woodpecker
author: Tom Robbins
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> Charlotte’s Web 24178 Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, is a classic of children's literature that is "just about perfect." This high-quality paperback features vibrant illustrations colorized by Rosemary Wells!

Some Pig. Humble. Radiant. These are the words in Charlotte's Web, high up in Zuckerman's barn. Charlotte's spiderweb tells of her feelings for a little pig named Wilbur, who simply wants a friend. They also express the love of a girl named Fern, who saved Wilbur's life when he was born the runt of his litter.

E. B. White's Newbery Honor Book is a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come. This edition contains newly color illustrations by Garth Williams, the acclaimed illustrator of E. B. White's Stuart Little and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, among many other books.]]> 184 E.B. White 0064410935 Joanne 5 kiddos 4.20 1952 Charlotte’s Web
author: E.B. White
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> On the Beach 38180 On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.]]> 296 Nevil Shute Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 3.95 1957 On the Beach
author: Nevil Shute
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)]]> 43763
Louis and Claudia travel Europe, eventually coming to Paris and the ragingly successful Theatre des Vampires--a theatre of vampires pretending to be mortals pretending to be vampires. Here they meet the magnetic and ethereal Armand, who brings them into a whole society of vampires. But Louis and Claudia find that finding others like themselves provides no easy answers and in fact presents dangers they scarcely imagined.

Originally begun as a short story, the book took off as Anne wrote it, spinning the tragic and triumphant life experiences of a soul. As well as the struggles of its characters, Interview captures the political and social changes of two continents. The novel also introduces Lestat, Anne's most enduring character, a heady mixture of attraction and revulsion. The book, full of lush description, centers on the themes of immortality, change, loss, sexuality, and power.
source: annerice.com]]> 346 Anne Rice 0345476875 Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 4.04 1976 Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
author: Anne Rice
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> Catch-22 168668
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.]]> 453 Joseph Heller 0684833395 Joanne 5 favorites 3.99 1961 Catch-22
author: Joseph Heller
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Poisonwood Bible 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 Joanne 5 favorites 4.10 1998 The Poisonwood Bible
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Joanne 5 favorites, want-to-re-read 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2018/06/08
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: favorites, want-to-re-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)]]> 629 Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.]]> 540 Robert M. Pirsig 0060589469 Joanne 5 want-to-re-read 3.78 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
author: Robert M. Pirsig
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: want-to-re-read
review:

]]> The Invention of Hugo Cabret 9673436 534 Brian Selznick Joanne 5 kiddos 4.22 2007 The Invention of Hugo Cabret
author: Brian Selznick
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: kiddos
review:

]]> The Nickel Boys 49607563 This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead 0385545444 Joanne 0 to-read 4.21 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Conversations with Friends 35489672 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 336 Sally Rooney 0571334245 Joanne 0 to-read 3.74 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Keep House While Drowning]]> 60139504 How to Keep House While Drowning will introduce you to six life-changing principles that will revolutionize the way you approach home care—without endless to-do lists. Presented in 31 daily thoughts, this compassionate guide will help you begin to get free of the shame and anxiety you feel over home care.

Inside you will learn:
· How to shift your perspective of care tasks from moral to functional;
· How to stop negative self-talk and shame around care tasks;
· How to give yourself permission to rest, even when things aren’t finished;
· How to motivate yourself to care for your space.]]> 151 K.C. Davis 166800285X Joanne 0 to-read 4.22 2022 How to Keep House While Drowning
author: K.C. Davis
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma]]> 18693771 A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.]]> 464 Bessel van der Kolk 0670785938 Joanne 0 to-read 4.36 2014 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
author: Bessel van der Kolk
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Psychology of Money 41881472 242 Morgan Housel 0857197681 Joanne 0 to-read 4.27 2020 The Psychology of Money
author: Morgan Housel
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Into the Wild 60869516 Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

"Terrifying... Eloquent... A heart-rending drama of human yearning." —New York Times

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless.

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.]]> 217 Jon Krakauer Joanne 0 4.13 1996 Into the Wild
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hundred Years' War on Palestine]]> 52960854
Accepted interpretations of the confrontation tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. Drawing on archival materials and the accounts of generations of family members—judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists�The Hundred Years' War on Palestine instead shows that this war has always been colonial in nature, waged against the native population first by the Zionist movement and then by Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.

Neither a chronicle of victimization nor a whitewash of mistakes made by Palestinian leaders, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine offers both a compelling family history and an original, illuminating view of the Middle East's most intractable conflict.]]> 319 Rashid Khalidi 1250787653 Joanne 0 to-read 4.45 2020 The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Yellowface 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Joanne 0 to-read 3.69 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Joanne 0 to-read 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Wood at Midwinter 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 Joanne 0 to-read 3.47 2024 The Wood at Midwinter
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Joanne 4 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
I may upgrade to 5 stars, but need to think about it a little more. Still trying to decide what I make of this book.
]]> My Last Name 56569094 44 Eric M. Schumacher 1736408003 Joanne 0 to-read 4.49 2021 My Last Name
author: Eric M. Schumacher
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay]]> 3985 639 Michael Chabon 0312282990 Joanne 0 dnf 4.18 2000 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
author: Michael Chabon
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: dnf
review:
To be fair, I can’t really rate this book, because I just can’t get into it. I’ve tried to read it 3 times, and every time I just don’t enjoy it. So I officially give up.
]]> Remarkably Bright Creatures 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Joanne 3 4.35 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
Meh. Would have been two stars if not for the octopus.
]]> Furiously Happy 28220896 #1 New York Times Bestseller

In Furiously Happy, a humor memoir tinged with just enough tragedy and pathos to make it worthwhile, Jenny Lawson examines her own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest:

"I've often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that â€normal people' also might never understand. And that's what Furiously Happy is all about."

Jenny’s readings are standing room only, with fans lining up to have Jenny sign their bottles of Xanax or Prozac as often as they are to have her sign their books. Furiously Happy appeals to Jenny's core fan base but also transcends it. There are so many people out there struggling with depression and mental illness, either themselves or someone in their family—and in Furiously Happy they will find a member of their tribe offering up an uplifting message (via a taxidermied roadkill raccoon). Let's Pretend This Never Happened ostensibly was about embracing your own weirdness, but deep down it was about family. Furiously Happy is about depression and mental illness, but deep down it's about joy—and who doesn't want a bit more of that?]]> 329 Jenny Lawson 1250077028 Joanne 0 to-read 4.08 2015 Furiously Happy
author: Jenny Lawson
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Pope Joan 27252 A world-wide bestseller, major motion picture and upcoming "Director's Cut" TV mini-series exclusively for the U.S!

For a thousand years her existence has been denied. She is the legend that will not die�Pope Joan, the ninth-century woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female ever to sit on the throne of St. Peter. Now in this riveting novel, Donna Woolfolk Cross paints a sweeping portrait of an unforgettable heroine who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept.

Brilliant and talented, young Joan rebels against medieval social strictures forbidding women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak–and his identity–and enters the monastery of Fulda. As Brother John Anglicus, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she becomes enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion, and politics. Triumphing over appalling odds, she finally attains the highest office in Christendom–wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But such power always comes at a price . . .

In this international bestseller, Cross brings the Dark Ages to life in all their brutal splendor and shares the dramatic story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of her day.]]> 422 Donna Woolfolk Cross 0345416260 Joanne 3 4.08 1996 Pope Joan
author: Donna Woolfolk Cross
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Joanne 0 to-read 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)]]> 6388 This an alternate cover for 9780385504218

An ingenious code hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. A desperate race through the cathedrals and castles of Europe. An astonishing truth concealed for centuries . . . unveiled at last.

While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci—clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.



Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion—a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci—and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle—while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move—the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.]]> 522 Dan Brown Joanne 1 3.65 2003 The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)
author: Dan Brown
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Starless Sea 43575115 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.]]> 498 Erin Morgenstern 038554121X Joanne 0 to-read 3.82 2019 The Starless Sea
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Song of Achilles 11250317
Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.]]> 352 Madeline Miller 1408816032 Joanne 0 to-read 4.38 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Dead Poets Society 67238 166 N.H. Kleinbaum 0553282980 Joanne 0 to-read 4.19 1988 Dead Poets Society
author: N.H. Kleinbaum
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir]]> 203931803 A powerful memoir that reckons with mental health as well as the insidious ways men impact the lives of women.

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.�

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. As the title suggests, many of these moments are impacted by men: unrequited love in high school; the twenty-eight-year-old she lost her virginity to when she was sixteen; the frustrations and absurdities of dating in her mid-thirties; and her decision to freeze her eggs as all her friends were starting families.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.� By the end of the book, she fulfills that wish.]]> 304 Anna Marie Tendler 1668032341 Joanne 0 to-read 3.42 2024 Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir
author: Anna Marie Tendler
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Joanne 3 3.83 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Joanne
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
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I have mixed feelings about this book. Great story, but I found the rambling maximalist narrative style really distracting and hard to navigate.
]]> If Beale Street Could Talk 206571250 224 James Baldwin 0593688988 Joanne 0 to-read 4.40 1974 If Beale Street Could Talk
author: James Baldwin
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> Half of a Yellow Sun 58456361 --back cover]]> 543 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Joanne 0 to-read 4.37 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 284066
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami Joanne 0 to-read 4.14 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Poverty, by America 204736844 The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in because the rest of us benefit from it. ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus ReviewsThe United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 320 Matthew Desmond 0593239938 Joanne 0 to-read 4.23 2023 Poverty, by America
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> Bad Feminist: Essays 199531809          ]]> 352 Roxane Gay 0063384809 Joanne 0 to-read 4.03 2014 Bad Feminist: Essays
author: Roxane Gay
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Joanne 0 to-read 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Joanne 4 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
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]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Joanne 4 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/10
date added: 2024/07/12
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]]> Lessons in Chemistry 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus Joanne 4 4.23 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/07/12
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]]> Mad Honey 59912428 A soul-stirring novel about what we choose to keep from our past, and what we choose to leave behind.

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.

And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily can’t help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can she trust him completely . . .

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge the flashes of his father’s temper in him, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves.]]> 464 Jodi Picoult 1984818384 Joanne 3 4.05 2022 Mad Honey
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/07
date added: 2024/07/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Anthony Adverse (Anthony Adverse, #1-3)]]> 1755883
Volume 1. The Roots of the Tree
Volume 2. The Other Bronze Boy
Volume 3. The Lonely Twin]]> 1120 Hervey Allen 2702835139 Joanne 0 to-read 4.02 1933 Anthony Adverse (Anthony Adverse, #1-3)
author: Hervey Allen
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1933
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk]]> 78130090 An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want

Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl� and “Double Dare Ya� are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumul­tuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band� in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.]]> 326 Kathleen Hanna 0062825232 Joanne 0 to-read 4.40 2024 Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
author: Kathleen Hanna
name: Joanne
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
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