en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:09:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 18754110
These stories are acts of resistance and defiance, proclaiming the endurance of Palestinians and the continuing resilience and creativity of their culture in the face of ongoing obstacles and attempts to silence them.

Whether tackling the tragedy that surrounds missile strikes and home raids, or the everyday indignities encountered by Palestinian refugees, Gaza Writes Back brings to life the real issues that the people of Gaza face. One prominent theme in many of the stories is the value placed on the wisdom of parents and grandparents. A sense of longing pervades the book, as the characters in the stories reveal desires ranging from the mundane to the complex—including, in several of the stories, a strong yearning to return to the charactersâ€� long-cherished family homes and properties after many decades in exile from them. Social differences within Gaza are also sensitively explored. A few stories are especially difficult—but critical—to digest , for the vividness with which they depict the experiences of victims of Israeli military strikes and confront the legacy of violence and occupation, particularly on young people.

Readers will be moved by the struggles big and small that emerge from the well-crafted writing by these young people, and by the hope and courage that radiates from the authorsâ€� biographies. The contributors are university students and recent graduates, Palestinians who have chosen to speak out in their second language, which is an “expressive way to be more creative in a world where words are significantly mighty,â€� according to Tasnim Hamouda. Another contributor, Nour El Borno, believes “that if a person can write effectively, it is his or her duty to get up, write, and help change this world to something better.â€�

Five years after Operation Cast Lead, these stories remind us that the pain lingers on and the people of Gaza will be forever scarred by the attack. Yet, the call for justice remains forceful and persistent, and these young Gazan writers refuse to let the world forget about them—their land, their people, and their story.]]> 208 Refaat Alareer 1935982354 Samoyes 4 own 4.58 2014
author: Refaat Alareer
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: own
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]]> 213702691 Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.]]> 256 Mohammed El-Kurd Samoyes 0 currently-reading, own 4.89 2025
author: Mohammed El-Kurd
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> 213395480 From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance.

Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .

Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.]]> 208 Virginia Feito 1631498630 Samoyes 5 own 3.62 2025
author: Virginia Feito
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: own
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Hands down the best fiction I’ve read this year. The POV is so unique in that it’s snarky and bad. Each sentence takes you deeper and deeper into this Victorian world.
]]> 205900042 Both a forceful polemic and a practical guide, Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent is a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, a monthly tribute that drives millions to debt, despair, and into the streets. In the context of a permanent housing crisis and governments in the pocket of real estate interests, Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants political actors who can, through organizing, direct action, and collective bargaining, bring about a housing system that meets their needs.Ìę

Abolish Rent is the first book-length engagement with the resurgent tenant movement. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis—cofounders of Los Angles’s many thousand member tenant union—offer a deeply-reported account centering poor and working class tenants who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. They take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line.Ìę

If rent abolition is our aim, tenant power must be the means—built through everyday resistance in our buildings and on our blocks. This is the revolutionary project we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.]]> 200 Tracy Rosenthal Samoyes 0 to-read 4.55
author: Tracy Rosenthal
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.55
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date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> 24693870 A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation—and the debut of an important new social critic

How much of what we understand of ourselves as “humanâ€� depends on our physical and mental abilities—how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of “humanâ€� depends on its difference from “animalâ€�?

Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled—and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls “cripping animal ethics.â€�

Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring—whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals—Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice.]]> 272 Sunaura Taylor 1620971283 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.56 2015
author: Sunaura Taylor
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 63231006 192 Micha Frazer-Carroll 0745346715 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.36 2023
author: Micha Frazer-Carroll
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> 35883430 From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America.

Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.

In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.

For readers who have engaged with America's legacy on race through the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all.]]> 185 Austin Channing Brown Samoyes 0 to-read 4.36 2018
author: Austin Channing Brown
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 39872917 The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . .: the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.]]> 145 Ottessa Moshfegh 052552276X Samoyes 3
This story peruses the depths of friendship between two people from very different backgrounds yet similar depths of darkness. Inside McGlue’s head we encounter the splintered forms his life has taken, mostly alongside Johnson. McGlue’s head is literally split in half and it takes him to try and piece it back together. As we follow his high seas memories, we slowly come to think we understand this relationship and possibly what happened, yet we cannot be sure due to McGlue’s poor memory from drink.

I enjoyed the ending, but for a novella it took me awhile to get through. I wished there was more clarity about certain moments, but this is an intentional obfuscation due to McGlue’s damaged mind. The lists of items were a bit much and I found there was a bit too much repetition without new information. Still a good read that captures the dangers and damage of alcoholism as well as the complex intimacy of this male friendship. ]]> 3.25 2014
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
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Although my least favourite of this author’s work so far, I can see how this novella, published in 2014, was the beginning of her writing career. The story is of McGlue who is accused of murdering his best friend yet due to his insatiable addiction to the drink he has no recollection of the matter. We as readers are alongside McGlue as he struggles with what can only be described as a hangover from years of drinking.

This story peruses the depths of friendship between two people from very different backgrounds yet similar depths of darkness. Inside McGlue’s head we encounter the splintered forms his life has taken, mostly alongside Johnson. McGlue’s head is literally split in half and it takes him to try and piece it back together. As we follow his high seas memories, we slowly come to think we understand this relationship and possibly what happened, yet we cannot be sure due to McGlue’s poor memory from drink.

I enjoyed the ending, but for a novella it took me awhile to get through. I wished there was more clarity about certain moments, but this is an intentional obfuscation due to McGlue’s damaged mind. The lists of items were a bit much and I found there was a bit too much repetition without new information. Still a good read that captures the dangers and damage of alcoholism as well as the complex intimacy of this male friendship.
]]> 208580597 The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theoryâ€�, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.]]> 384 Johanna Hedva 163893116X Samoyes 4 3.87
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.87
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rating: 4
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]]> 1466
Includes Heracles, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Alcestis.]]> 312 Anne Carson 1590171802 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.37 -416
author: Anne Carson
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.37
book published: -416
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> 8513333 Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen's long-awaited first photographic monograph. Social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies--the "black world"--for the last eight years, publishing, speaking and making astonishing photographs. As an artist, Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.]]> 160 Trevor Paglen 1597111309 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.02 2010
author: Trevor Paglen
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> 42921509 What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?

Alaa, a young Palestinian, is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance; that search, and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine.]]> 256 Ibtisam Azem 0815611110 Samoyes 5 4.13 2014
author: Ibtisam Azem
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> 44000543 128 Matthieu Simard 1552453936 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.59 2017
author: Matthieu Simard
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> 208896778 Taking back control? States and state systems after globalizationThe era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.]]> 416 Wolfgang Streeck 1839767294 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.08
author: Wolfgang Streeck
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.08
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 214986269 A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a provocative, defiant debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder,ÌęShaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a high-class prostituteâ€�). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body andÌęunrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't aways grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potentialÌęof our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Samoyes 4 3.51 2023
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/04/01
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]]> 58297471
Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte.

Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for—while she stands trial for speaking the truth.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes.

Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa's urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late.]]> 288 Maria Ressa 0753559218 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.34 2022
author: Maria Ressa
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.â€� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.Ìę

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.Ìę

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.â€� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,â€� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.Ìę

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Samoyes 4 own 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Samoyes 4 own 3.76 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: own
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]]> 25130532 A terrifying short story from Shirley Jackson, the master of the macabre tale.Shirley Jackson's chilling tales of creeping unease and random cruelty have the power to unsettle and terrify unlike any other. When her story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail. It became known as one of the greatest short stories ever written. Have you read her yet?'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written' Donna Tartt'An amazing writer ... if you haven't read any of her short stories ... you have missed out on something marvellous' Neil Gaiman'Her stories are stunning, timeless - as relevant and terrifying now as when they were first published ... 'The Lottery' is so much an icon in the history of the American short story that one could argue it has moved from the canon of American twentieth-century fiction directly into the American psyche, our collective unconscious' A. M. Homes Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48.]]> 11 Shirley Jackson Samoyes 0 to-read 3.60 1949
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> 154462576 New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale

January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?

November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.

As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.]]> 325 Katherine Arden 0593128257 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.96 2024
author: Katherine Arden
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 123844668
‘Argues that a radical politics of neurodiversityÌę is necessary, not only for neurodivergent folk,Ìę but for our collective liberation’Ì� Professor Hel Spandler, editor,Ìę Asylum magazine
‘A vital book that kindles the flames of aÌę neurodivergent revolution’Ì� Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author ofÌę Health Communism

Neurodiversity is on the rise. Awareness and diagnoses have exploded in recent years, but we are still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. Beyond simplistic narratives of normativity and difference, this groundbreaking book exposes the very myth of the ‘normalâ€� brain as a product of intensified capitalism.

Exploring the rich histories of the neurodiversity and disability movements, Robert Chapman shows how the rise of capitalism created an ‘empire of normalityâ€� that transformed our understanding of the body into that of a productivity machine. Neurodivergent liberation is possible â€� but only by challenging the deepest logics of capitalism.Ìę Empire of Normality Ìęis an essential guide to understanding the systems that shape our bodies, minds and deepest selves â€� and how we can undo them.

Robert Chapman Ìęis a neurodivergent philosopher who has taught at King’s College London and Bristol University. They are currently Assistant Professor in Critical Neurodiversity Studies at Durham University. They blog atÌę Psychology Today Ìęand atÌę Critical Neurodiversity .Ìę]]> 204 Robert Chapman 0745348661 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.34 2023
author: Robert Chapman
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> 41552709
This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.

Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.]]> 310 David Wallace-Wells 0525576703 Samoyes 0 own, to-read 4.00 2019
author: David Wallace-Wells
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: own, to-read
review:

]]> 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and historyâ€� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]> 639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 Samoyes 0 own, currently-reading 4.31 2015
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: own, currently-reading
review:

]]> 203866820 On a remote country estate in the 19th century, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl that he once carved out of her mother’s body. It is the dawn of modern gynaecology, when the female body appears as a cryptic landscape and male hubris reigns.

The girl lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Here, dirt and runaway visions dominate, while vast skies and sticky nature rub against her confinement.

Caesaria is part gothic novel, part fairy tale told in lush and elegant prose. These pages radiate a low-level dread, probing gender warfare and class oppression with dreamlike prose. What is reality to those who have grown up trapped in their own bodies, relying upon their own senses, without any contact with the world outside? Nordenhök shares an astonishing answer, almost mythological in scope, through the story of one eponymous girl.]]> 188 Hanna Nordenhök 1771669128 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.53
author: Hanna Nordenhök
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.53
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 200189179
Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. But her mother has taught her that if you're not too bound by the Big Man's rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. Now her mother is dead in a trick gone wrong and young Tibb is orphaned and alone.

As she wends her way across England's fields and forests, Tibb will discover there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything.

And so, when the opportunity presents itself to escape the shackles society has placed on them, Tibb and her new friends conjure an audacious plan: her greatest trickerie yet. But before they know it, their hoax takes on a life of its own, drawing crowds - and vengeful enemies - to their door...

A Little Trickerie is blazingly original, disarmingly funny and deeply moving. Portraying a side of Tudor England rarely seen, it's a tale of belief and superstition, kinship and courage, with a ragtag cast of characters and an unforgettable and distinctly unangelic heroine.]]> 371 Rosanna Pike 0241646065 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.16 2024
author: Rosanna Pike
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205706169
Masterfully translated by Yewon Jung, The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre weaves a chilling tale of deceptive sweetness and the body horror of slowly melting into your loved ones.]]> 208 Cho yeeun 1915829038 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.56 2019
author: Cho yeeun
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56901217 The Promise , winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for -- not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator's eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.]]> 269 Damon Galgut 1609456580 Samoyes 3 own
What I really loved about this book was the narrative form. Within a single scene, paragraph, or look we enter the thoughts and perceptions of those around. We seamlessly drift into the minds of others which creates a rich tapestry of the community and its underlying violence. ]]> 4.00 2021
author: Damon Galgut
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: own
review:
A book that centres on four separate deaths and funerals within a family. This family is more like separate bodies who are solitary until a death occurs. The wealth of the family invested in land and agriculture slowly withers away just like the family, and hidden in the backdrop of this is a promise to give Salome, a house servant, possession of her quarters. Land, wealth, isolation and fate cast shadows over the story in a subtly strong way. However, I found myself getting bored. I needed something more to keep my attention. I couldn’t really connect with any of the characters. I felt isolated and removed from the plot.

What I really loved about this book was the narrative form. Within a single scene, paragraph, or look we enter the thoughts and perceptions of those around. We seamlessly drift into the minds of others which creates a rich tapestry of the community and its underlying violence.
]]> 33414148 The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force."]]> 384 Margaret Atwood 0735253307 Samoyes 5 own 4.12 1985
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: own
review:
This was my mother’s favourite author and book, so of course it was going to be a special read for me. I feel like I flew through this book and craved to know more and more about this world. I had watched the first three seasons of the TV adaptation and am surprised how closely it sticks to the book. I do think that having seen the show that this kinda brought the book down for me. I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t expect that cliffhanger ending. And I really loved the confessional style of narrative and its unreliability. Very good read!
]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Samoyes 3 own
I loved some of the writing in this book. I enjoyed trying to calculate the meanings and repetition that pervades this story of a woman having to experience the same day over and over. However, I just needed something else. The monotony, like the character’s experience, went from something I could go along with until I started to wish for something. Some clue or resolution. Something to move the story a little bit more. I was also sort of expecting a more climactic ending since I had read other reviews of the book whereby people stated that once they finished the book they had to get the second volume right away. Maybe it was the hype that got to me? Nevertheless, I definitely enjoyed the book and will treasure some of the passages. ]]> 3.89 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: own
review:
This is more of a 3.5�.i think.

I loved some of the writing in this book. I enjoyed trying to calculate the meanings and repetition that pervades this story of a woman having to experience the same day over and over. However, I just needed something else. The monotony, like the character’s experience, went from something I could go along with until I started to wish for something. Some clue or resolution. Something to move the story a little bit more. I was also sort of expecting a more climactic ending since I had read other reviews of the book whereby people stated that once they finished the book they had to get the second volume right away. Maybe it was the hype that got to me? Nevertheless, I definitely enjoyed the book and will treasure some of the passages.
]]> 63024270
The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy.

Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power , Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it.]]> 368 Colin Dickey 0593299450 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.86 2023
author: Colin Dickey
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 44146682 Strange Weather in Tokyo, set during a summer afternoon and featuring a mischievous pair of creatures called tengu.

On a summer afternoon, Tsukiko and her former high school teacher have prepared and eaten somen noodles together.

“Tell me a story from long ago,â€� Sensei says.

“I wasn’t alive long ago,â€� Tsukiko says, “but should I tell you a story from when I was little?â€�

“Please do,â€� Sensei replies, and so Tsukiko tells him that, when she was a child, she awakened one day to find something with a pale red face and something with a dark red face in her room, arguing with each other. They had human bodies, long noses, and wings. They were tengu, creatures that appear in Japanese folktales.

The tengu attach themselves to Tsukiko and begin to follow her everywhere. Where did they come from and why are they here? And what other invisible and unacknowledged forces are acting upon Tsukiko’s seemingly peaceful world?]]> 96 Hiromi Kawakami 1593765800 Samoyes 0 to-read, own 3.78 2004
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 65714 As the first-person record of Leo Kall, scientist, fellow-soldier too late disillusioned to undo his previous actions, Kallocain achieves a chilling power and veracity that place it among the finest novels to emerge from the strife-torn Europe of the twentieth century.]]> 193 Karin Boye 0299038947 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.70 1940
author: Karin Boye
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 563 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Samoyes 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 2939570 Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!]]> 389 Kelly Link 0670010901 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.92 2008
author: Kelly Link
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123636870
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.Ìę

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 192 Sarah Bernstein 1039009069 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.02 2023
author: Sarah Bernstein
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195703882 Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifyingâ€� yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 278 Monika Kim 1645661237 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Monika Kim
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attentionâ€�

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.74 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57933306 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]> 357 Johann Hari 0593138511 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.22 2022
author: Johann Hari
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199531878 240 Ruben Reyes Jr. 0063336278 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.10 2024
author: Ruben Reyes Jr.
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 638193 112 Caroline Blackwood 0140069232 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.72 1976
author: Caroline Blackwood
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220772
The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane?]]> 194 Sara Gran 0425210316 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.63 2003
author: Sara Gran
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1612312 208 Ben Okri 0140116028 Samoyes 5 own 3.78 1988
author: Ben Okri
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: own
review:

]]> 27818492
Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism have shaped the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowers and producers of knowledge. From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to the volume explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women's knowledge, its rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape. From the reconstruction of cultural and ecological heritage by Naskapi women in Qu?bec to the medical expertise of M?tis women in western Canada to the mapping and securing of land rights in Nicaragua, Living on the Land focuses on the integral role of women as stewards of the land and governors of the community. Together, these contributions point to a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities for Indigenous women and their communities.]]> 240 Nathalie Kermoal 1771990414 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.16
author: Nathalie Kermoal
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59667535
Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations. Editors Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez present 28 powerful excerpted passages from Indigenous leaders, including Mourning Dove, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Winona LaDuke, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Accompanied by the editors� own analyses, each chapter reflects the wisdom of Indigenous worldview precepts


The editors emphasize our deep need to move away from the dominant Western paradigm--one that dictates we live without strong social purpose, fails to honor the earth as sacred, leads with the head while ignoring the heart, and places individual “rightsâ€� over collective responsibility. Restoring the Kinship Worldview is rooted in an Indigenous vision and strong social purpose that sees all life forms as sacred and sentient--that honors the wisdom of the heart, and grants equal standing to rights and responsibilities. All author proceeds from Restoring the Kinship Worldview are donated to Indigenous non-profit organizations working on behalf of Indigenous Peoples.

Inviting readers into a world-sense that expands beyond perceiving and conceiving to experiencing and being, Restoring the Kinship Worldview is a salve for our times, a nourishment for our collective, and a holistic orientation that will lead us away from extinction toward an integrated, sustainable future.]]> 336 Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) 1623176425 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.20
author: Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows)
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15841762 192 Ladislav Fuks Samoyes 0 to-read 4.03 1967
author: Ladislav Fuks
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216670080
A pregnant woman’s sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child’s picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, every one holding a disturbing clue, this novel invites readers to piece together the harrowing truth behind each and the overarching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the bestselling international debut from mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.]]> 236 Uketsu 0063433087 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.05 2022
author: Uketsu
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 209311051
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair and possibility—a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 442 Sally Rooney 0571365469 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.03 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60720 The Other America has been established as a seminal work of sociology. This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington’s essays on poverty in the 1970s and â€�80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today’s America.

When Michael Harrington’s masterpiece, The Other America, was first published in 1962, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the war on poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor—from farm to city—and the social forces that relegated them to their difficult situations. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country, radically changing how we view the poor and the policies we employ to help them.]]> 252 Michael Harrington 068482678X Samoyes 0 to-read, own 4.06 1962
author: Michael Harrington
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read, own
review:

]]> 121987041 Salvaging a decolonised future

Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Kevin Ochieng Okoth revisits historical moments when Black radicalism was defined by international solidarity in the struggle against capitalist-imperialism, that together help us to navigate the complex histories of the Black radical tradition.

He challenges common misconceptions about national liberation, showing that the horizon of national liberation was not limited to the nation-building projects of post-independence governments.

While African socialists sought to distance themselves from Marxism and argued for a ‘third wayâ€� socialism rooted in ‘traditional African cultureâ€� the intellectual and political tradition Okoth calls ‘Red Africaâ€� showed that Marxism and Black radicalism were never incompatible.

The revolutionary Black politics of Eduardo Mondlane, AmĂ­lcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and AndrĂ©e Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which clings onto the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to let go.Ìę

Red Africa is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, it is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition—which has been betrayed, violently suppressed, or erased—and to build from it a Black revolutionary politics capable of imagining new futures out of the uncertain present.]]> 177 Kevin Ochieng Okoth 1839767391 Samoyes 4 own 4.17 2023
author: Kevin Ochieng Okoth
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.17
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rating: 4
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]]> 177281801
Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action.Ìę Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did â€� or did not â€� draw from this.Ìę

This concise and magisterial history of the Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.]]> 271 Shlomo Sand 150955825X Samoyes 0 to-read 3.59
author: Shlomo Sand
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]]> 839517 Angel in the Forest recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana. The original community was founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism. Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen's New Moral World to George Bush's New World Order. Written with the same elegance, wit, and lyric beauty that distinguishes her fiction, Angel in the Forest was widely praised upon its first publication in 1945. This edition includes Mark Van Doren's introduction to Scribner's 1966 reprint.]]> 331 Marguerite Young 1564780546 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.46 1945
author: Marguerite Young
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 145660
The four chapters at the heart of the book then follow, each a portrayal of a gifted Polish man who capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of the Communist state. They are identified only as Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, The Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour. However, each of the four portraits were easily identifiable: Alpha is Jerzy Andrzejewski, Beta is Tadeusz Borowski, Gamma is Jerzy Putrament and Delta is Konstanty Ildefons GaƂczyƄski.

The book moves toward its climax with an elaboration of "enslavement through consciousness" in the penultimate chapter and closes with a pained and personal assessment of the fate of the Baltic nations in particular.]]> 272 CzesƂaw MiƂosz 0679728562 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.27 1953
author: CzesƂaw MiƂosz
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1953
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]]> 127462058 "[A] well-reasoned and eye-opening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes]Ìęa provocative and visionary proposal."
�Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

"Saito’s clarity of thought, plethora of evidence, and conversational, gentle, yet urgent tone . . . are sure to win over open-minded readers who understand the dire nature of our global. . . . A cogently structured anti-capitalist approach to the climate crisis."
�Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and are nevertheless unable to make ends meet, with no future prospects, while the planet is burning?

In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for “sustainable growthâ€� and a “Green New Dealâ€� are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist societyâ€� the system that caused the problem in the first place cannot be an integral part of the solution.Ìę

Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues

the end of mass production and mass consumptiondecarbonization through shorter working hours the prioritization of essential labor over corporate profits
By returning to a system of social ownership, he argues, we can restore abundance and focus on those activities that are essential for human life, effectively reversing climate change and saving the planet.]]> 273 Kƍhei Saitƍ 1662602359 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.89 2020
author: Kƍhei Saitƍ
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
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]]> 199346797 A horror-story history of capitalism and its relationship to the haunted and the gothic, and a manifesto of Gothic Marxism, which finds revolutionary hope in the nightmare of modernity.

What does it mean to see horror in capitalism? What can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism?

Blending film criticism, cultural theory, and philosophy, Capitalism: A Horror Story examines literature, film, and philosophy, from Frankenstein to contemporary cinema, delving into the socio-political function of the monster, the haunted nature of the digital world, and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics.

Revitalizing the tradition of Romantic anticapitalism and offering a “dark way of being redâ€�, Capitalism: A Horror Story argues for a Gothic Marxism, showing how we can find revolutionary hope in horror- a site of monstrous becoming that opens the door to a Utopian future.]]> 207 Jon Greenaway 1914420888 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.91 2024
author: Jon Greenaway
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.91
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]]> 157056100
Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life,Ìęfrom her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery.

In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.]]> 214 Morgan Parker 052551144X Samoyes 0 to-read 4.16 2024
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name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.16
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]]> 211934018 The activist and spoken-word dynamo Roya Marsh returns with a searing exploration of Black rage, solidarity, and healing.

what will come of what you leave behind?
do you
remember that time
you survived?

The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.

In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for
Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,â€� she writes, “â€�see you laterâ€� was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.â€�

As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless.]]> 113 Roya Marsh 0374615802 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.22
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]]> 211934927
Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna―these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mamaâ€� donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister―who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years―in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.]]> 272 Youssef Rakha 1644453193 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.79
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name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.79
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]]> 16033852 Alternate cover edition can be found here

An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives - all over the course of one meal.

It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.]]> 352 Herman Koch Samoyes 0 to-read 3.42 2009
author: Herman Koch
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.42
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]]> 58997370
‘An exceptional ear for dialogue, an impeccable semantic rhythm and an uncanny ability to tease laughter out of the darkest moments mean Erskine is perfectly poised to stare, unflinching, into our neoliberal abyss. The result is a gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour.â€� Guardian

‘Acutely, brilliantly observed . . . Erskine writes about her characters without sentiment but with compassion and, perhaps most importantly, with a sense of the absurd that finds humour in the darkest of places . . . The stories in Sweet Home are often very funny, even when they unsettle.â€� The Times

‘Completely brilliant . . . Erskine’s gift for understated black comedy, crisp dialogue and sharp characterisation ensures that Sweet Home is no wallow-in-kitchen-sink misery. Reading it is an enlivening experience and Erskine’s career is one to keep an eye on in the years to come.' Will Gore, ‘Five books to read this Autumnâ€�, Spectator]]> 224 Wendy Erskine 1529079675 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.00 2022
author: Wendy Erskine
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
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]]> 41793363
A reclusive cult-rock icon ends his days in the street where he was born; a lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a husband and wife become enmeshed in the lives of the young couple they pay to do their cleaning and gardening.

Set in contemporary East Belfast, these eleven acutely observed short stories come charged with regret and sorrow, desire and yearning. With clear-eyed compassion and wry humour, Wendy Erskine deftly lays bare her characters� struggle to maintain control in an often cruel world, where tragic events cast long shadows. Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine heralds the arrival of a wonderfully compelling and truly distinctive voice from Northern Ireland.]]> 221 Wendy Erskine 1906539723 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.00 2018
author: Wendy Erskine
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 214152128 Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying goneâ€�

Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the â€�if you never owned a bone-sharp biographyâ€� / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.â€�

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.]]> 96 Maria Zoccola 1668046334 Samoyes 0 to-read, own 4.13 2025
author: Maria Zoccola
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.13
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]]> 205307209 Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems ofÌęBook of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be. By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.]]> 104 Lauren K. Watel 1956046356 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.89
author: Lauren K. Watel
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.89
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]]> 213243274 Explores the architecture of haunted houses, uncanny domestic spaces, and how the horror genre subverts and corrupts the sanctity of home.

The history of horror begins with a house. From Otranto to Amityville, the haunted house story endures because it perverts what is equally the most universal and the most personal of the home. Our home is an extension of our self, a manifestation of our identity, and a repository of our memories. It is a micro-universe of our own creation that we control. It is also where we are the most vulnerable because we are supposed to be the most safe.

Whether it is a decrepit Victorian mansion, a modernist luxury high-rise, a little cottage in the woods, or a starter house in the suburbs, Sick Houses explores how the horror genre in film, television, and literature uses architecture and the ideology of the home against us. It looks at the mythology of the American Dream and how the lure of homeownership becomes a trap. It celebrates the witch house, the power of the crone, and the fear of aging women who live alone. It explores how concrete utopias became ready-made mise en scene for urban terror.

From the betrayal of sentient shape-shifting houses to shadow-self dollhouse doppelgangers, Sick Houses examines how the horror genre subverts and corrupts that which is the most sacrosanct.]]> 232 Leila Taylor 1915672643 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.84 2025
author: Leila Taylor
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 201730880 'A brilliant, scholarly, sharp and witty account of our weird eternal obsession with the end times... So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end - the world, or the book.� � Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

'Everything Must Go will make you happy to be alive and reading � until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' � The Spectator

A riveting and brilliantly original exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Marvel's Age of Ultron, by the Baillie Gifford and Orwell prize-shortlisted writer and co-host of the podcast 'Origin Story'.

For two millennia, Christians have looked forward to the end, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. But for two centuries or more, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might come to an end.

Dorian Lynskey's fascinating book explores the endings that we have read, listened to or watched over the last two dozen decades, whether they be by the death and destruction of a nuclear holocaust or collision with a meteor or comet, devastating epidemic or takeover by robots or computers.

The result is nothing less than a cultural history of the modern world, weaving together politics, history, science, high and popular culture in a book that is uniquely original, grippingly readable and deeply illuminating about both us and our times.

'I was blown away by this book... Lynskey is one of the best non-fiction writers around.' � Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland

'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound. You’ll never see humanity the same way again.' â€� Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't]]> 509 Dorian Lynskey 1529095964 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Dorian Lynskey
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.04
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]]> 181866974 Introducing the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark glimmers with an unearthly light and a nearly radioactive power

The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing―at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific―casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation―the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.]]> 112 Liliana Colanzi 0811237184 Samoyes 5 own 3.68 2022
author: Liliana Colanzi
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/01
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I LOVE this collection of dark cyber-punk stories. They feel very grounded with a touch of something misaligned that eventually shows its full self. I like the choppiness of the stories that highlights change in place and time rather than relying on characters. Not a single story is bad. The Cave, is a story of snippets of what happens in a cave over time and into the future, starts this amazing collection off. You Glow In the Dark, finishes the collection with snapshots of the GoliĂąnia radiological incident and how this affected so many lives. Many of these stories center around secrets and the harm they do to ourselves and others. This is an author I am definitely keeping an eye out for.
]]> 50695164 A bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist's essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery--or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.]]> 288 Masha Gessen 0593188934 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.15 2020
author: Masha Gessen
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
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]]> 165938555
Political instability, poverty, climate change,ÌęandÌętheÌęinsatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demandÌęfor smugglers whoÌęaid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes , or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason DeÌęLeĂłn embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.

The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, DeÌęLeĂłn expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.]]> 367 Jason De LeĂłn 0593298586 Samoyes 5 4.31 2024
author: Jason De LeĂłn
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 978689 Ìę
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
Ìę
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.â€� “These ten men were not men of distinction,â€� Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
Ìę
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.]]> 346 Milton Sanford Mayer 0226511928 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.14 1955
author: Milton Sanford Mayer
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1955
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]]> 61108472 The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know itÌę

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.Ìę

In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.]]> 720 Malcolm Harris 031659203X Samoyes 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Malcolm Harris
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
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]]> 53479022 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigrationâ€�Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 266 Charles Yu 0307948471 Samoyes 3 own
I had really high hopes for this book. I liked its form which is like a tv script. This plays on the idea of how certain minorities (Asian) are made to feel alien in America and are limited to a tertiary role in media and in life. There is a lot of wry humour in here too. What didn’t work for is also the form. I never felt attached to any of the characters. There was so much absurdity with the tv role and real life roles that, to me, it became gimmicky and predictable. ]]> 4.03 2020
author: Charles Yu
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: own
review:
More of a 2.5

I had really high hopes for this book. I liked its form which is like a tv script. This plays on the idea of how certain minorities (Asian) are made to feel alien in America and are limited to a tertiary role in media and in life. There is a lot of wry humour in here too. What didn’t work for is also the form. I never felt attached to any of the characters. There was so much absurdity with the tv role and real life roles that, to me, it became gimmicky and predictable.
]]> 206120253 Liberal civilisation is in crisis—now is a time of monstersThe rise of the new far-right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte, the true peril lies elsewhere. They are but the political manifestations of a potent force - disaster nationalism. This mass cultural phenomenon, propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, emerges from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation.At its core, disaster nationalism fixates on images of catastrophe - the 'Great Replacement,' Satanic 'cabals' - as explanations for its discontent. It yearns for an 'end of days,' a reckoning, a 'storm' as the QAnon faithful call it, to bring an end to its suffering. This yearning is only heightened by the relentless onslaught of real-world disasters, from economic recessions to global pandemics and ecological collapse.Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from 'lone wolf' killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism.In Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming phenomenon, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, this book offers a stark warning and a call to action. The battle against disaster nationalism is not just political; it is a struggle for our collective soul and the future of civilization itself.]]> 288 Richard Seymour 180429425X Samoyes 0 to-read 4.11
author: Richard Seymour
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 145624993 The Immortal Life ofÌęHenriettaÌęLacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, thatÌę New York Times Ìębestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.â€�

On a cold day in March ofÌę1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland.ÌęUnder the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
Ìę
In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
Ìę
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.
Ìę
In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Ìę]]> 368 Antonia Hylton 1538723697 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.25 2024
author: Antonia Hylton
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199454353 An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread.

From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us.]]> 256 Lena Valencia 1959030620 Samoyes 4 own 3.58 2024
author: Lena Valencia
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: own
review:

]]> 123182432 A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.]]> 12 Myriam Gurba 1797165739 Samoyes 4 Loved!!! 4.33 2023
author: Myriam Gurba
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
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Loved!!!
]]> 37119750 'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.'

A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.]]> 181 Katherine Mansfield 0241341647 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.65 1922
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1922
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208580653 From the award-winning novelist of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, giving voice to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.� � Rashid Khalidi, author of the New York Times bestseller The Hundred Years� War on Palestine]]> 96 Isabella Hammad 0802163920 Samoyes 4 own 4.68 2024
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: own
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]]> 203579085 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sistersâ€� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sistersâ€� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 291 Julia Armfield 125034431X Samoyes 3 own 3.58 2024
author: Julia Armfield
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: own
review:

]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.87 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?â€� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.â€� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.34 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9311201
It is here, in Shangri-La, where destinies will be discovered and the meaning of paradise will be unveiled.]]> James Hilton Samoyes 5 3.97 1933
author: James Hilton
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1933
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> 213939495
Here, in the unbearable heat of Victorica, Argentina, our child protagonist is a humanoid mosquito. Carrier of the deadly dengue virus, his monstrous appearance not only makes him a target for his cruel classmates - led by the little tyrant El Dulce - but also elicits disgust from his own mother.

As the world spirals to its end, Dengue Boy searches for the meaning of his life and his true origins. Elsewhere, adults negotiate the value of pandemics on the Stock Exchange and waste the last of Earth's resources, while children more privileged than Dengue Boy plug into virtual realities and constant streams of violent video games. In delirious prose that brings together the picaresque, manga, body horror and cyberpunk, Dengue Boy delivers an extraordinary and bizarre portrait of a demented future.]]> 222 Michel Nieva Samoyes 0 to-read 3.27 2023
author: Michel Nieva
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 122109737 Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in the Cote d'Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.


A century later and a young Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d'Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.


GauZ' looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d'Ivoire.

]]> 203 Gauz 1529414466 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.38 2018
author: Gauz
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195468033 116 Munir Hachemi 1804270881 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.80
author: Munir Hachemi
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196674636 Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.

In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.

After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.]]> 256 Pol Guasch 0374612951 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.44 2021
author: Pol Guasch
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 12336661 On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.]]> 234 Nevil Shute Samoyes 3 own 3.87 1957
author: Nevil Shute
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/31
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: own
review:

]]> 63313297 An acclaimed Swedish author makes her English language debut with this intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.

A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the woman's own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.

There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who gleefully campaigns for a baby even though he knows their love has no future. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret.

The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.]]> 144 Ia Genberg 0063309718 Samoyes 4 own 3.94 2022
author: Ia Genberg
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: own
review:

]]> 45010932
By examining the ways that fairy tales have shaped our expectations of disability, Disfigured will point the way toward a new world where disability is no longer a punishment or impediment but operates, instead, as a way of centering a protagonist and helping them to cement their own place in a story, and from there, the world. Through the book, Leduc ruminates on the connections we make between fairy tale archetypes—the beautiful princess, the glass slipper, the maiden with long hair lost in the tower—and tries to make sense of them through a twenty-first-century disablist lens. From examinations of disability in tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen through to modern interpretations ranging from Disney to Angela Carter, and the fight for disabled representation in today's media, Leduc connects the fight for disability justice to the growth of modern, magical stories, and argues for increased awareness and acceptance of that which is other—helping us to see and celebrate the magic inherent in different bodies.]]> 253 Amanda Leduc 1552453952 Samoyes 2 own 4.08 2020
author: Amanda Leduc
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: own
review:
This just wasn’t what I was looking for. I was seeking more of an emphasis on the fairy tales.
]]> 56943582
Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.]]> 116 Claire Keegan 0571368689 Samoyes 4 own 4.21 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: own
review:
This short book will surely become a Christmas classic and maybe even be adapted to film one day. As per the tradition of great Christmas stories, this a novel about a working class man reflecting on his past and present as the year ends and Christmas approaches. It’s about recognising the ways that you are fortunate and the power of the small things in helping make big decisions.
]]> 23308433 128 Marian Engel 0771030134 Samoyes 3 own
While this novel has left me thinking about these issues, I wish I had read this with others to gain their perspectives on it. And, alas, as rich of a story it is I can only give it three stars. I wish there had been more about Lucy, whom I suspect had a similar relationship with the bear. I did begin to get bored at points too.]]> 3.50 1976
author: Marian Engel
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1976
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: own
review:
This book is known for its eroticism of a bear by a woman named Lou who surprisingly finds this pet bear at a location where she is expected to archive the contents of the house. Set on an island which mirrors Lou’s own solitary and sequestered life, she comes to become more fascinated with the bear than her subject of study. And she is not the only one. This novel harkens back to the notion for the need to reconnect to nature, and also reconnect with the self. What I found interesting is the role of history in this book. Genealogies, folk tales, libraries and oral history are fundamental to this text. Meanwhile, it’s also a gender queer novel about sexual identity as well as the need to take control of your sexuality, even though there are always risks and power dynamics in sex and relationships.

While this novel has left me thinking about these issues, I wish I had read this with others to gain their perspectives on it. And, alas, as rich of a story it is I can only give it three stars. I wish there had been more about Lucy, whom I suspect had a similar relationship with the bear. I did begin to get bored at points too.
]]> 33517724 Soon to be an HBO Film starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortalâ€� human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “coloredâ€� ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortalityâ€� until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.]]> 400 Rebecca Skloot 0804190100 Samoyes 0 to-read, own 4.21 2010
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read, own
review:

]]> 51168664 In this witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive "feminine" passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millennia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.]]> 288 Aoko Matsuda 1593766904 Samoyes 3 own 3.77 2016
author: Aoko Matsuda
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: own
review:
This book of interconnected stories was recommended to me as a collection of gothic stories, so perhaps that was the wrong way to approach these stories. All of these stories are modern day renderings of traditional Japanese tales. Except the other emphasises in each story the power and oppression of women and the past. Ghosts move through the world just like people in this collection with both realms intermingling. That was a fun aspect to this collection as well as reading the notes that indicate which Japanese tales inspired each story. For me, I was hoping for a heavier emphasis on the gothic and more emotional breadth in the stories. It felt somewhat uneven to me, which sometimes happens with this kind of collection.
]]> 204886311 In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade.

Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe. Befriended by a stranger, she grabs an old, faded history book and writes her own version over the top—a record of the Great Undoing on the run.

But in deciding what truth to tell Scarlet must face her own history. How do we navigate identity when it is all a lie? She must reckon with her past before she can imagine her future.]]> 304 Sharlene Allsopp 1761151665 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.88
author: Sharlene Allsopp
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201924482
As a child in Beijing in the 1970s, Lai lives with her family in a lively, working-class neighborhood near the heart of the city. Thoughtful yet unassuming, she spends her days with her friends beyond the attention of her Her father is a reclusive figure who lingers in the background, while her mother, an aging beauty and fervent patriot, is quick-tempered and preoccupied with neighborhood gossip. Only Lai's grandmother, a formidable and colorful maverick, seems to really see Lai and believe that she can blossom beyond their circumstances.

But Lai is quickly awakened to the harsh realities of the Chinese state. A childish prank results in a terrifying altercation with police that haunts her for years; she also learns that her father, like many others, was broken during the Cultural Revolution. As she enters adolescence, Lai meets a mysterious and wise bookseller who introduces her to great works-Hemingway, Camus, and Orwell, among others-that open her heart to the emotional power of literature and her mind to thrillingly different perspectives. Along the way, she experiences the ebbs and flows of friendship, the agony of grief, and the first steps and missteps in love.

A gifted student, Lai wins a scholarship to study at the prestigious Peking University where she soon falls in with a theatrical band of individualists and misfits dedicated to becoming their authentic selves, despite the Communist Party's insistence on conformity-and a new world opens before her. When student resistance hardens under the increasingly restrictive policies of the state, the group gets swept up in the fervor, determined to be heard, joining the masses of demonstrators and dreamers who display remarkable courage and loyalty in the face of danger. As 1989 unfolds, the spirit of change is in the air�

Drawn from her own life, Lai Wen's novel is mesmerizing and haunting-a universal yet intimate story of youth and self-discovery that plays out against the backdrop of a watershed historic event. Tiananmen Square captures the hope and idealism of a new generation and the lasting price they were willing to pay in the name of freedom.]]> 528 Lai Wen 1954118392 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Lai Wen
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.97
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]]> 208185059 For readers of Naomi Klein and Nicole Perlroth, a myth-dissolving exposĂ© of what “artificial intelligenceâ€� really means, and a resounding argument for an equitable future of A.I. Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible. This book presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network that maintains this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of A.I.Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, Feeding the Machine describes the lives of the workers deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. It gives voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, from accomplished writers and artists to the armies of data annotators, content moderators and warehouse workers, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized, and colonial exploitation.A.I. is an extraction machine that feeds off humanity's collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms. This book is a call to arms that details what we need to do to fight for a more just digital future.]]> 288 James Muldoon 1639734961 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.14 2024
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name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.14
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]]> 127282778 Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

AI has already infiltrated our day-to-day, through language-generating chatbots like ChatGPT and social media. But it’s also affecting us in more insidious ways. It touches everything from our interpersonal relationships, to our kidsâ€� education, work, finances, public services, and even our human rights.

By highlighting the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from the cozy enclave of Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often-exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency, and shatter our illusion of free will.

The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we can’t agree on a common path forward. We cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities—or what controls we may want to impose on them. And thus, we are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

In Code Dependent, Murgia not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small, and Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.]]> 320 Madhumita Murgia 1250867398 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Madhumita Murgia
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.07
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]]> 109987707
The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas , led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the idea of Ìędrawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not.

As Natalie Koch demonstrates in this evocative, narrative history, the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries - from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert's Dune - bound Ìęthe two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.]]> 208 Natalie Koch Samoyes 0 to-read, own 4.00
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]]> 203166778 A smart, funny crash course in the horror movie canon, from Psycho to Hereditary, for people who love getting the reference but hate being scared.

You don't have to miss out just because you don't like to be frightened! Stop trying to read nonsensical Wikipedia plot summaries (we know you’re doing it), and let an expert tell you everything you need to know about the most influential horror films of the past 60 years—without a single jump scare or a drop of gore.

With a rundown of the history and significance of horror cinema, explanations of common tropes, and detailed entries on 25 important movies ranging from Night of the Living Dead to The Blair Witch Project to Get Out, Horror for Weenies will turn even the scarediest of cats into a confident connoisseur.

Each entry includes:
- A detailed plot summary, with enough jokes that it won’t freak you out
- Smart, illuminating analysis of the film’s themes and cultural significance
- Descriptions of iconic scenes you definitely do not want to look at
- Talking points for impressing even the biggest scary-movie buffs

Never get left out of a conversation again!]]> 272 Emily C. Hughes 1683694252 Samoyes 0 to-read 4.34 2024
author: Emily C. Hughes
name: Samoyes
average rating: 4.34
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]]> 101161005
Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day’s chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens­­—the man who’s haunted his whole life—back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he’s done.

Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.

Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens’s wife, a spirit-medium whose sĂ©ances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving, as it becomes clear that the restless dead are never far behind. Something is coming through.]]> 400 Ally Wilkes 1982182822 Samoyes 0 to-read, own 3.18 2023
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name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.18
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]]> 42527596 When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?

Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants
until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.

Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.

From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher.]]> 385 T. Kingfisher 1534429573 Samoyes 0 to-read 3.60 2019
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Samoyes
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2019
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