Pat's bookshelf: read en-US Thu, 15 May 2025 15:28:10 -0700 60 Pat's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The End of Drum-Time 60741781 FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

An epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle

In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders—of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides—as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.

Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.]]> 368 Hanna Pylväinen 1250822904 Pat 5 3.88 2023 The End of Drum-Time
author: Hanna Pylväinen
name: Pat
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/15
date added: 2025/05/15
shelves: historical-fiction, international
review:

]]> Fascism: A Warning 35230469 A personal and urgent examination of Fascism in the twentieth century and how its legacy shapes today’s world, written by one of America’s most admired public servants, the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state

A Fascist, observes Madeleine Albright, “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”�

The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions dead. Given the horrors of that experience, one might expect the world to reject the spiritual successors to Hitler and Mussolini should they arise in our era. In Fascism: A Warning, Madeleine Albright draws on her experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to question that assumption.

Fascism, as she shows, not only endured through the twentieth century but now presents a more virulent threat to peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II.  The momentum toward democracy that swept the world when the Berlin Wall fell has gone into reverse.  The United States, which historically championed the free world, is led by a president who exacerbates division and heaps scorn on democratic institutions.  In many countries, economic, technological, and cultural factors are weakening the political center and empowering the extremes of right and left.  Contemporary leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are employing many of the tactics used by Fascists in the 1920s and 30s.

Fascism: A Warning is a book for our times that is relevant to all times.  Written  by someone who has not only studied history but helped to shape it, this call to arms teaches us the lessons we must understand and the questions we must answer if we are to save ourselves from repeating the tragic errors of the past.]]> 320 Madeleine K. Albright 0062802232 Pat 5 history, nonfiction 4.23 2018 Fascism: A Warning
author: Madeleine K. Albright
name: Pat
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: history, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue]]> 123739932 A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's #1 New York Times Bestselling Author genre-defying tour de force.]]> 434 Victoria E. Schwab Pat 4 kindle, fiction 4.22 2020 The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Pat
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: kindle, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Have Always Lived in the Castle]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret.

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features an afterword by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Pat 4 fiction, kindle 3.93 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Pat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: fiction, kindle
review:

]]> I Served the King of England 397503 I Served the King of England is a story of how the unbelievable came true. Its remarkable hero, Ditie, is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from the German invasion to the victory of Communism. Ditie's fantastic journey intertwines the political and the personal in a narrative that both enlightens and entertains.]]> 243 Bohumil Hrabal 081121687X Pat 4 2025-global 4.13 1983 I Served the King of England
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Pat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: 2025-global
review:

]]> The Book Censor's Library 175678711 A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret libraries, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 Pat 5 2025-global 3.92 2019 The Book Censor's Library
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Pat
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: 2025-global
review:

]]> Stealing 61252412
Since her mother’s death, Kit Crockett has lived with her grief-stricken father, spending lonely days far out in the country tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day when Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road, she is intrigued.

Kit and her new neighbor Bella become fast friends. Both outsiders, they take comfort in each other’s company. But malice lurks near their quiet bayou and Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of tragic, fatal crime. Soon, Kit is ripped from her home and Cherokee family and sent to Ashley Lordard, a religious boarding school. Along with the other Native students, Kit is stripped of her heritage, force-fed Christian indoctrination, and is sexually abused by the director. But Kit, as strong-willed and shrewd as ever, secretly keeps a journal recounting what she remembers—and revealing just what she has forgotten. Over the course of Stealing, she slowly unravels the truth of how she ended up at the school—and plots a way out.

In swift, sharp, and stunning prose, Margaret Verble spins a powerful coming-of age tale and reaffirms her place as an indelible storyteller and chronicler of history.]]> 238 Margaret Verble 0063267055 Pat 4 2025-global 3.99 2023 Stealing
author: Margaret Verble
name: Pat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: 2025-global
review:

]]> The Postcard 201966010 Anne Berest’s The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.]]> 480 Anne Berest Pat 3 historical-fiction, paperback 4.41 2021 The Postcard
author: Anne Berest
name: Pat
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: historical-fiction, paperback
review:
I'm sorry, but it was just too many and too much - too many characters, some of which had such bit parts as to be unnecessary, and too much detail that was extraneous, as though the author was trying to include everything she knew about this period. The writing was serviceable, but nothing more. And I found the intermittent conversations between the author and her mother disruptive, unnecessary and almost juvenile. Obviously this was about the author's family; I think this would have done better as a memoir.
]]> Memorial Days 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Pat 5 4.33 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Pat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: a-list-nonfiction, memoir-biography
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Father's House (Rome Escape Line Trilogy, #1)]]> 61447882
September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. Gestapo boss Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. Hunger is widespread. Rumors fester. The war’s outcome is far from certain.

Diplomats, refugees, and escaped Allied prisoners flee for protection into Vatican City, at one fifth of a square mile the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome. A small band of unlikely friends led by a courageous Irish priest is drawn into deadly danger as they seek to help those seeking refuge.

Book 1 in the Rome Escape Line Trilogy, My Father’s House is a powerful, heartbreaking literary thriller based on the true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who risked his life to smuggle thousands of Jews and escaped Allied prisoners out of Italy under the nose of his Nazi nemesis. A deadly high-stakes battle of wits ensues in this astonishing, unforgettable story of love, faith and sacrifice, exploring what it means to be truly human in the most extreme circumstances.]]> 276 Joseph O'Connor Pat 3 3.98 2023 My Father's House (Rome Escape Line Trilogy, #1)
author: Joseph O'Connor
name: Pat
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: historical-fiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress]]> 533465 184 Dai Sijie 0385722206 Pat 4 international, fiction 3.64 2000 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
author: Dai Sijie
name: Pat
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: international, fiction
review:

]]> The Lost Pianos of Siberia 50616973
Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos � grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.

How these pianos travelled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decemberist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, following Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful � and peppered with pianos.]]> 448 Sophy Roberts 0802149286 Pat 4 3.95 2020 The Lost Pianos of Siberia
author: Sophy Roberts
name: Pat
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: nonfiction, paperback, history
review:

]]> One Writer's Beginnings 12590
Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.]]> 128 Eudora Welty 0674639278 Pat 4 4.08 1983 One Writer's Beginnings
author: Eudora Welty
name: Pat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/04
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: nonfiction, ireland, memoir-biography
review:

]]> Agent Running in the Field 43904017 Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all.

]]> 282 John Le Carré 1984878875 Pat 4 fiction, spies_wwii 3.75 2019 Agent Running in the Field
author: John Le Carré
name: Pat
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: fiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Pat 3 fiction 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Pat
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Held 200241802
1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts whose messages he cannot understand .

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation.

Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From the WW1 battlefield where the novel begins, and its opening lines, Held is alive with "We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”]]> 240 Anne Michaels 0771005458 Pat 5 historical-fiction 3.49 2023 Held
author: Anne Michaels
name: Pat
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> Via Negativa 49348748
Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by his conservative diocese for eccentricity and insubordination, he's made his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, transforming his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk's cell. Like the ascetic religious philosophers he idolizes, he intends to spend his trip in peaceful contemplation. But then he sees a minivan sideswipe a coyote. Unable to suppress his Franciscan impulses, he takes the wild animal in, wrapping its broken leg with an old T-shirt and feeding it Spam with a plastic spoon.

With his unexpected canine companion in the backseat, Dan makes his way west, encountering other offbeat travelers and stopping to take in the occasional roadside novelty (MARTIN'S HOLE TO HELL, WORLD-FAMOUS BOTTOMLESS PIT NEXT EXIT!). But the coyote is far from the only oddity fate has delivered into this churchless priest's care: it has also given him a bone-handled pistol, a box of bullets, and a letter from his estranged friend Paul--a summons of sorts, pulling him forward.

By the time Dan gets to where he's going, he'll be forced to reckon once and for all with the great mistakes of his past, and he will have to decide: is penance better paid with revenge, or with redemption?]]> 245 Daniel Hornsby 0525658475 Pat 4 fiction 3.99 2020 Via Negativa
author: Daniel Hornsby
name: Pat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Flights 36885304 Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Here I am --
World in your head --
Your head in the world --
Syndrome --
Cabinet of curiosities --
Seeing is knowing --
Seven years of trips --
Guidance from Cioran --
Kunicki: water (I) --
Benedictus, quivenit]]> 416 Olga Tokarczuk 0525534199 Pat 4 international, short-stories 3.73 2007 Flights
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Pat
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/26
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: international, short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

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

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

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 305 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Pat 3 fiction 3.65 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Pat
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: fiction
review:
I was SO disappointed! I loved Drive Your Plow Over the Dead, but here there were no characters to care about. The "horror" didn't happen until the very end, and the lead up just wasn't that engaging or mysterious. There was a lot of philosophical, political etc discussion that I found tedious. Did I mention I was disappointed?
]]> This Is Happiness 50403512
A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing.

You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is something has changed.

The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right something has changed .

This is the story of all that was to Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.

Niall Williams' latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.]]> 390 Niall Williams 1635576318 Pat 5 fiction, ireland 4.27 2019 This Is Happiness
author: Niall Williams
name: Pat
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: fiction, ireland
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division]]> 50485581
Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. We feel overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, by an endless feeling of crisis. So, how can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? And how can we stay sane in this age of division?

In this powerful, uplifting plea for conscious optimism, Booker Prize-nominated novelist and activist Elif Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to bring us together. In the process, she reveals how listening to each other can nurture democracy, empathy and our faith in a kinder and wiser future.]]> 96 Elif Shafak 1788165721 Pat 4 4.00 2020 How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
author: Elif Shafak
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies]]> 58532200
Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo's daughter, Dolma, in Toronto. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector's vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams.

Breathtaking in its scope and powerful in its intimacy, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this novel provides a nuanced, moving portrait of the little-known world of Tibetan exiles.]]> 368 Tsering Yangzom Lama 1635576415 Pat 4 2025-global 4.07 2022 We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies
author: Tsering Yangzom Lama
name: Pat
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: 2025-global
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The World and All That It Holds]]> 60784834 The World and All That It Holds--in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory--showcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.

And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller; Pinto's protector and lover.

Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman--with the occasional opiatic interlude--that keeps him going.]]> 352 Aleksandar Hemon 0374287708 Pat 4 historical-fiction, paperback 3.81 2023 The World and All That It Holds
author: Aleksandar Hemon
name: Pat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: historical-fiction, paperback
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness]]> 361459 NATIONAL BESTSELLER � A deeply powerful memoir about bipolar illness that has both transformed and saved lives—with a new preface by the author.

Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide.

Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.]]> 240 Kay Redfield Jamison 0679763309 Pat 0 4.06 1995 An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
author: Kay Redfield Jamison
name: Pat
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Bear 196056205 A mesmerising novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor � a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth.

They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.

Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.

Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.

A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us � and within us � Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.]]> 304 Julia Phillips 0525520430 Pat 3 fiction 3.21 2024 Bear
author: Julia Phillips
name: Pat
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Pat 0 i-have 4.06 2021 The Trees
author: Percival Everett
name: Pat
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: i-have
review:

]]> The Elephanta Suite 776457
This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.

We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.

As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose—or find—themselves there.]]> 274 Paul Theroux 0618943323 Pat 0 3.37 2007 The Elephanta Suite
author: Paul Theroux
name: Pat
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
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review:

]]> The Mosquito Coast 130520 384 Paul Theroux Pat 0 3.81 1981 The Mosquito Coast
author: Paul Theroux
name: Pat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> A Son of the Circus 7073 A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving's characters transcend nationality. They are misfits—coming from everywhere, belonging nowhere. Set almost entirely in India, this is John Irving's most ambitious novel and a major publishing event.]]> 680 John Irving 0345915623 Pat 0 3.65 1994 A Son of the Circus
author: John Irving
name: Pat
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Last Night in Twisted River 6323821
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.� From the novel’s taut opening sentence–“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.

What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”]]> 554 John Irving 1400063841 Pat 0 3.77 2009 Last Night in Twisted River
author: John Irving
name: Pat
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> The Hotel New Hampshire 11768 520 John Irving 0552992097 Pat 0 3.93 1981 The Hotel New Hampshire
author: John Irving
name: Pat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Loon Lake 29595
Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of mystery and menace, greed and ambition, harsh lust and tender love, that lays bare the darkest depths of the human heart and the nightmarish underside of the American dream. E. L. Doctorow has written a novel aglow with poetry and passion, lit by the burning fire of humanity and history, terror and truth.]]> 255 E.L. Doctorow 0452275687 Pat 0 3.50 1980 Loon Lake
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Pat
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> The Book of Daniel 411761 320 E.L. Doctorow 0452275660 Pat 0 3.86 1971 The Book of Daniel
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Pat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Billy Bathgate 871284 326 E.L. Doctorow 0452280028 Pat 0 3.79 1989 Billy Bathgate
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Pat
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Pat 4 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Pat
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves:
review:

]]> How to Turn Into a Bird 60583991 From the award-winning author of How to Order the Universe, María José Ferrada beautifully details the life and lessons of an unconventional man and the boy who loves him.

After years of hard work in a factory outside of Santiago, Chile, Ramón accepts a peculiar job: to look after a Coca-Cola billboard located by the highway. And it doesn’t take long for Ramón to make an even more peculiar decision: to make the billboard his new home.

Twelve-year-old Miguel is enchanted by his uncle’s unusual living arrangement, but the neighborhood is buzzing with gossip, declaring Ramón a madman bringing shame to the community. As he visits his uncle in a perch above it all, Miguel comes to see a different perspective, and finds himself wondering what he believes—has his uncle lost his mind, as everyone says? Is madness—and the need for freedom—contagious? Or is Ramón the only one who can see things as they really are, finding a deeper meaning in a life they can’t understand from the ground?

When a local boy disappears, tensions erupt and forgotten memories come to the surface. And Miguel, no longer perched in the billboard with his uncle, witnesses the reality on the ground: a society that, in the name of peace, is not afraid to use violence. With sharp humor and a deep understanding of a child’s mind, How to Turn Into a Bird is a powerful tale of coming of age, loss of innocence, and shifting perspectives that asks us: how far outside of our lives must we go to really see things clearly?]]> 224 María José Ferrada 1953534465 Pat 4 2024-global 3.65 2021 How to Turn Into a Bird
author: María José Ferrada
name: Pat
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> Loot 123220414 294 Tania James 1787304167 Pat 4 historical-fiction, paperback 3.59 2023 Loot
author: Tania James
name: Pat
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: historical-fiction, paperback
review:

]]> Catch the Rabbit 57562115 Winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Lana Bastašic’s powerful debut novel Catch the Rabbit is an emotionally rich excavation of the complicated friendship between two women in a fractured, post-war Bosnia as they venture into the treacherous terrain of the Balkan wonderlands and their own history.

It’s been twelve years since inseparable childhood friends Lejla and Sara have spoken, but an unexpected phone call thrusts Sara back into a world she left behind, a language she’s buried, and painful memories that rise unbidden to the surface. Lejla’s magnetic pull hasn’t lessened despite the distance between Dublin and Bosnia or the years of silence imposed by a youthful misunderstanding, and Sara finds herself returning home, driven by curiosity and guilt. Embarking on a road trip from Bosnia to Vienna in search of Lejla’s exiled brother Armin, the two travel down the rabbit hole of their shared past and question how they’ve arrived at their present, disparate realities.

As their journey takes them further from their homeland, Sara realizes that she can never truly escape her past or Lejla—the two are intrinsically linked, but perpetually on opposite sides of the looking glass. As they approach their final destination, Sara contends with the chaos of their relationship. Lejla’s conflicting memories of their past, further complicated by the divisions brought on by the dissolution of Yugoslavia during their childhoods, forces Sara to reckon with her own perceived reality. Like Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Catch the Rabbit lays bare the intricacies of female friendship and all the ways in which two people can hurt, love, disappoint, and misunderstand one another.]]> 256 Lana Bastašić 1632062895 Pat 5 2024-global 3.74 2018 Catch the Rabbit
author: Lana Bastašić
name: Pat
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> Little Drummer Girl 606871
THE QUARRY—a Palestinian known only by his trademark: a small coil of surplus wire tossed into the crude homemade bombs that have slain Jews in cities across Europe.

THE HUNTER—the fiercely passionate Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence office who patiently and elaborately sets a delicate trap for the quarry he loathes.

THE RUNNER—Joseph, the battle-scarred veteran of the Israeli special forces, he is called back into service to carry out an assignment that will scorch his very soul.

THE SNARE—Charlie, the brilliant English actress who, perilously alone, is lured into "the theatre of the real"...the little drummer girl who is drawn inexorably to the frightening nucleus of a magnificent deception.]]> 515 John Le Carré 0553239813 Pat 4 spies_wwii 3.80 1983 Little Drummer Girl
author: John Le Carré
name: Pat
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: spies_wwii
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ben Macintyre's World War II Espionage Files: Agent Zigzag/Operation Mincemeat]]> 15849569 New York Times bestseller, Double Cross. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Agent Zigzag is the story of Eddie Chapman, a charmer, a criminal, a con man, and one of the most remarkable double agents in all of British history. Deemed “brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining� by Malcolm Gladwell, Operation Mincemeat unveils top secret material directly from the officers, spies, and masterminds of World War II. Each true tale is told through the vantage point of covert officials as they unravel webs of espionage and deception to yield Allied success. Macintyre’s are words that read, according to Entertainment Weekly, “like something by Ian Fleming.”]]> 1025 Ben Macintyre 0385348673 Pat 5 4.31 2012 Ben Macintyre's World War II Espionage Files: Agent Zigzag/Operation Mincemeat
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Pat
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/29
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: nonfiction, kindle, spies_wwii
review:

]]> Memory Wall 29073255 134 Anthony Doerr 3406689612 Pat 5 short-stories 3.87 2010 Memory Wall
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Pat
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/08
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> Austral 62039278 From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.

The English writer Aliza Abravanel races to finish her final novel before her mind deteriorates. The last living speaker of a language is confronted with the disappearance of his culture. Through the construction of an esoteric theater of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide seeks to recover the memories buried in the trauma of war. Seeking the connecting thread between these three stories of loss is Julio, a disillusioned professor of literature who receives a posthumous summons from his old friend Aliza that will send him hurtling into a painful episode from his past.

A novel of compassion and of return--to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself--Austral maps a journey from war-ravaged Guatemala to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune founded in Paraguay by Elisabeth F�rster-Nietzsche. A treasure box of intertwined stories, it is a fascinating investigation into the pain of loss, the disappearance of language and memory, and the dangers of globalization. With this dazzling exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and those we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

Includes black-and-white illustrations]]> 224 Carlos Fonseca 037460665X Pat 4 2024-global 3.68 2022 Austral
author: Carlos Fonseca
name: Pat
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

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.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Pat 3 3.86 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Pat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> All My Puny Sorrows 18339630
You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking.

But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Can she be nursed back to “health� in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.

All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.]]> 321 Miriam Toews 0345808002 Pat 4 fiction 4.00 2014 All My Puny Sorrows
author: Miriam Toews
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Pat 5 4.11 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Pat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Man Tiger 23012658
Lyrical and bawdy, experimental and political, this extraordinary novel announces the arrival of a powerful new voice on the global literary stage.]]> 172 Eka Kurniawan 1781688591 Pat 4 2024-global 3.99 2004 Man Tiger
author: Eka Kurniawan
name: Pat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> The Bee Sting 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 Pat 4 ireland 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Pat
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> Time Shelter 123242869 Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a â€clinic for the pastâ€� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a â€time shelterâ€�, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present â€� a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov’s reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1474623077 Pat 4 3.56 2020 Time Shelter
author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Pat
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: 2024-global, paperback, prize-winner-nominee
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine]]> 9806853 Broken Glass Park. When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, "stupid Sulfia," is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa's surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother's eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.


Told with sly humor and an anthropologist's eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.

]]> 262 Alina Bronsky 160945006X Pat 4 2024-global 3.80 2010 The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
author: Alina Bronsky
name: Pat
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur]]> 60715042
Featuring a foreword by Ted Chiang, an alternate opening to Everything Everywhere All at Once, an original essay by Sasha Sagan, and excerpted writing from Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Watts, and David Eagleman, the book also includes:

� Three original short stories by Esmé Weijun Wang, Etgar Keret, and Emily Segal, all beginning with the same sentence
â—� Parallel short fiction by Billy Chew, Julia Pott, and Daniel Kwan
â—� An original comic by Lizzy Stewart
â—� A conversation between three quilters on the quilted theory of the multiverse
â—� An interview between the Daniels and David Eagleman
â—� Original illustrations by 11 artists]]> 160 Daniel Kwan 1735911771 Pat 1 4.43 2022 A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur
author: Daniel Kwan
name: Pat
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The History of Man 55612296
Like everyone else, he feels unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of purpose, his identity.

But why has Emil’s life turned out so different from his parents�, who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it?

Prize-winning novelist Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu traces Emil’s life from boyhood to manhood â€� from his days at a privileged boarding school with the motto â€It is here that boys become the men of historyâ€�, to his falling in love with the ever-elusive Marion, whose free-spirited nature has dire consequences for his heart â€� all the while showing how Emil becomes a man apart.

Set in a southern African country that is never named, this powerful tale of human fallibility � told with empathy, generosity and a light touch � is an excursion into the interiority of the coloniser.]]> 282 Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu 1485904617 Pat 4 2024-global 4.31 2020 The History of Man
author: Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
name: Pat
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All the Names They Used for God]]> 35082451 A haunting, diverse debut story collection that explores the isolation we experience in the face of the mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives

Anjali Sachdeva's debut collection spans centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters but is united by each character's epic struggle with fate: A workman in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills is irrevocably changed by the brutal power of the furnaces; a fisherman sets sail into overfished waters and finds a secret obsession from which he can't return; an online date ends with a frightening, inexplicable disappearance. Her story "Pleiades" was called "a masterpiece" by Dave Eggers. Sachdeva has a talent for creating moving and poignant scenes, following her highly imaginative plots to their logical ends, and depicting how one small miracle can affect everyone in its wake.

The world by night --
Glass-lung --
Logging lake --
Killer of kings --
All the names for God --
Robert Greenman and the mermaid --
Anything you might want --
Manus --
Pleiades]]> 259 Anjali Sachdeva 0399593004 Pat 5 short-stories 4.02 2018 All the Names They Used for God
author: Anjali Sachdeva
name: Pat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/05/03
shelves: short-stories
review:
Don't let the title mislead you - this is not a 'religious' or theological book, but rather a collection of very inventive and captivating stories.
]]> <![CDATA[The Labyrinth of the Spirits (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books #4)]]> 41824526 New York Times bestselling author returns to the magnificent universe he constructed in his bestselling novels The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, and The Prisoner of Heaven in this riveting series finale—a heart-pounding thriller and nail-biting work of suspense which introduces a sexy, seductive new heroine whose investigation shines a light on the dark history of Franco’s Spain.

In this unforgettable final volume of Ruiz Zafón’s cycle of novels set in the universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, beautiful and enigmatic Alicia Gris, with the help of the Sempere family, uncovers one of the most shocking conspiracies in all Spanish history.

Nine-year-old Alicia lost her parents during the Spanish Civil War when the Nacionales (the fascists) savagely bombed Barcelona in 1938. Twenty years later, she still carries the emotional and physical scars of that violent and terrifying time. Weary of her work as an investigator for Spain’s secret police in Madrid, a job she has held for more than a decade, the twenty-nine-year old plans to move on. At the insistence of her boss, Leandro Montalvo, she remains to solve one last case: the mysterious disappearance of Spain’s Minister of Culture, Mauricio Valls.

With her partner, the intimidating policeman Juan Manuel Vargas, Alicia discovers a possible clue—a rare book by the author Victor Mataix hidden in Valls� office in his Madrid mansion. Valls was the director of the notorious Montjuic Prison in Barcelona during World War II where several writers were imprisoned, including David Martín and Victor Mataix. Traveling to Barcelona on the trail of these writers, Alicia and Vargas meet with several booksellers, including Juan Sempere, who knew her parents.

As Alicia and Vargas come closer to finding Valls, they uncover a tangled web of kidnappings and murders tied to the Franco regime, whose corruption is more widespread and horrifying than anyone imagined. Alicia’s courageous and uncompromising search for the truth puts her life in peril. Only with the help of a circle of devoted friends will she emerge from the dark labyrinths of Barcelona and its history into the light of the future.

In this haunting new novel, Carlos Ruiz Zafón proves yet again that he is a masterful storyteller and pays homage to the world of books, to his ingenious creation of the Cemetery of Forgotten, and to that magical bridge between literature and our lives. ]]> 805 Carlos Ruiz Zafón 0062668706 Pat 5 4.49 2016 The Labyrinth of the Spirits (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books #4)
author: Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn
name: Pat
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, international
review:

]]> Abigail 43452825 Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.]]> 333 Magda Szabó 168137403X Pat 5 4.27 1970 Abigail
author: Magda SzabĂł
name: Pat
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: paperback, historical-fiction, international
review:

]]> Woman of the Ashes 39863241 The first in a trilogy about the last emperor of southern Mozambique by one of Africa’s most important writers

Southern Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last of the leaders of the state of Gaza, the second-largest empire led by an African. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village. Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese. But while one of her brothers fights for the Crown of Portugal, the other has chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes.

Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.]]> 272 Mia Couto 1250309298 Pat 4 2019-global-voices 3.32 2015 Woman of the Ashes
author: Mia Couto
name: Pat
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/18
date added: 2024/03/29
shelves: 2019-global-voices
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dark Voyage (Night Soldiers, #8)]]> 776710
"In the first nineteen months of European war, from September 1939 to March of 1941, the island nation of Britain and her allies lost, to U-boat, air, and sea attack, to mines and maritime disaster, one thousand five hundred and ninety-six merchant vessels. It was the job of the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy to stop it, and so, on the last day of April 1941 . . ."

May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa, she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmö.

But she is not the Santa Rosa. She is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coast–a secret mission, a dark voyage.

A desperate voyage. One more battle in the spy wars that rage through the back alleys of the ports, from elegant hotels to abandoned piers, in lonely desert outposts, and in the souks and cafés of North Africa. A battle for survival, as the merchant ships die at sea and Britain–the last opposition to Nazi German–slowly begins to starve.

A voyage of flight, a voyage of fugitives–for every soul aboard the Noordendam. The Polish engineer, the Greek stowaway, the Jewish medical officer, the British spy, the Spaniards who fought Franco, the Germans who fought Hitler, the Dutch crew itself. There is no place for them in occupied France; they cannot go home.

From Alan Furst–whom The New York Times calls America's preeminent spy novelist–here is an epic tale of war and espionage, of spies and fugitives, of love in secret hotel rooms, of courage in the face of impossible odds. Dark Voyage is taut with suspense and pounding with battle scenes; it is authentic, powerful, and brilliant.]]> 264 Alan Furst 0812967968 Pat 4 spies_wwii 4.05 2004 Dark Voyage (Night Soldiers, #8)
author: Alan Furst
name: Pat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves: spies_wwii
review:

]]> Two Sherpas 64645422 271 Sebastián Martínez Daniell 1913867412 Pat 3 2024-global 3.60 2018 Two Sherpas
author: Sebastián Martínez Daniell
name: Pat
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> Short Cuts: Selected Stories 11441 Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of “one of the true contemporary mastersâ€� (The New York Review of Books).ĚýĚý




From the eBook edition.]]> 157 Raymond Carver 0679748644 Pat 4 short-stories 4.13 1993 Short Cuts: Selected Stories
author: Raymond Carver
name: Pat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets]]> 25937922 For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and The Hare with Amber Eyes comes a propulsive, haunting journey into the secret history of brain science by Luke Dittrich, whose grandfather performed the surgery that created the most studied human research subject of all time: the amnesic known as Patient H.M.

In the late 1930s, in asylums and hospitals across America, a group of renowned neurosurgeons embarked on a campaign to develop and refine a new class of brain operation—the lobotomy—that they hoped would eradicate everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality. These "psychosurgeons," as they called themselves, occupied a gray zone between medical research and medical practice, and ended up subjecting untold numbers of people to the types of surgical experiments once limited to chimpanzees.

The most important test subject to emerge from this largely untold chapter in American history was a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison. In 1953, Henry—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the lobotomy, one that targeted the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry's seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry left the operating room profoundly amnesic, unable to create new long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

Luke Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Throughout, Dittrich delves into the enduring mysteries of the mind while exposing troubling stories of just how far we've gone in our pursuit of knowledge.

It is also, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich's grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author's investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather's relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.

Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.]]> 440 Luke Dittrich 0812992733 Pat 4 3.83 2016 Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
author: Luke Dittrich
name: Pat
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: nonfiction, soc-health-mental-health
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories]]> 122135662
“A writer,� Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader who is moved to emulation.� New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III took that idea and invited acclaimed authors to write about short stories that altered their view of life and their place in it—short stories that, ultimately, made them want to write something substantial themselves.

Here is Richard Russo on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,� Joyce Carol Oates on John Updike’s “A&P,� Tobias Wolff on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,� Michael Cunningham on James Joyce’s “The Dead.� Readers will gain new insight into these masterfully written stories but also on the contributors� own lives and work.

The fifty contributors are T.C. Boyle, Russell Banks, Richard Bausch, Robert Boswell, Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Anthony Doerr, Emma Donoghue, Stuart Dybek, Dagoberto Gilb, Julia Glass, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Jennifer Haigh, Jane Hamilton, Ron Hansen, Paul Harding, Ann Hood, Pam Houston, Gish Jen, Charles Johnson, Phil Klay, Dennis Lehane, Lois Lowry, Colum McCann, Sue Miller, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, Bich Nguyen, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Peter Orner, ZZ Packer, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Jayne Ann Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Anna Quindlen, Ron Rash, Richard Russo, Dani Shapiro, Mona Simpson, Jess Walter, Tobias Wolff, and Meg Wolitzer.

Reaching Inside will remind you why you fell in love with reading.]]> 320 Andre Dubus III 1567927696 Pat 4 essays 3.88 Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories
author: Andre Dubus III
name: Pat
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves: essays
review:

]]> A Little Luck 75582270
Not fully understanding her own reasons for going back to the place where she once lived and raised a family, and that she had been determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps her return is nothing more than a little luck…]]> 211 Claudia Piñeiro 1913867552 Pat 4 2024-global, paperback 4.31 2015 A Little Luck
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Pat
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves: 2024-global, paperback
review:

]]> The Fraud 64645700 451 Zadie Smith 0241337003 Pat 3 historical-fiction 3.37 2023 The Fraud
author: Zadie Smith
name: Pat
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/16
date added: 2024/02/16
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
My first Zadie Smith book. I wanted to love it but unfortunately for me, it was too long and too disjointed, with too many plot lines.
]]> A Perfect Spy 19001
Immersing readers in two parallel dramas -- one about the making of a spy, the other chronicling his seemingly imminent demise -- le Carre offers one of his richest and most morally resonant novels.Magnus Pym -- son of Rick, father of Tom, and a successful career officer of British Intelligence -- has vanished, to the dismay of his friends, enemies, and wife. Who is he? Who was he? Who owns him? Who trained him? Secrets of state are at risk. As the truth about Pym gradually emerges, the reader joins Pym's pursuers to explore the unsettling life and motives of a man who fought the wars he inherited with the only weapons he knew, and so became a perfect spy.]]> 608 John Le Carré 0743457927 Pat 4 fiction, spies_wwii 4.01 1986 A Perfect Spy
author: John Le Carré
name: Pat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/24
date added: 2024/02/13
shelves: fiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> The Letter Writer 25776133 Normandie, and word on the street is that it was burned by German saboteurs. "Ten lousy minutes in New York and already his new life felt as full of loss and betrayal as the one he'd left behind."

What he left behind in a small North Carolina town was a wife who’d left him, a daughter in the care of his sister, and a career as a police officer marred by questions surrounding his partner’s murder. When he gets a job with the NYPD, he wants to believe it’s the beginning of a new life, though he suspects that the past is as tenacious as "a parasite in the bloodstream."

It's on the job that Cain comes in contact with a man who calls himself Danziger. He has the appearance of a "crackpot," but he speaks five languages, has the manners of a man of means and education � and he appears to be the one person who can help Cain identify a body just found floating in the Hudson River. But who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side � "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: he hints at a much more worldly past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse. For one thing, he knows how the dead man was involved in New York City's "Little Deutschland," where swastikas were proudly displayed just months before. And he also seems to know how the investigation will put Cain � and perhaps his daughter and the woman he’s fallen for � in harm's way. But even Danziger can't know that the more he and Cain investigate, the nearer they come to the center of a citywide web of possibly traitorous corruption from which neither of them may get out alive.]]> 384 Dan Fesperman 1101875062 Pat 3 historical-fiction 3.57 2016 The Letter Writer
author: Dan Fesperman
name: Pat
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> The Leash and the Ball 62242504 272 Rodaan Al Galidi 164286112X Pat 5 2024-global 4.00 The Leash and the Ball
author: Rodaan Al Galidi
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/31
shelves: 2024-global
review:

]]> Horse 128747000 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a 19th-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred, Lexington, who became America’s greatest stud sire, Horse is a gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.]]> 416 Geraldine Brooks 1408710129 Pat 3 historical-fiction 4.46 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Pat
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/01/31
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
The author's in-depth and extensive research is evident, and she's a good storyteller. But for me, the writing was just serviceable; no words or phrases stood out or were particularly beautiful or memorable. Also, the romance between Theo and Jess seemed extraneous except to point out the obvious, that racism still exists in America.
]]> Open Throat 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

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

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

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X Pat 4 fiction 4.02 2023 Open Throat
author: Henry Hoke
name: Pat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Last Cruise 36534861
The 1950s vintage ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, among them Christine Thorne, a former journalist turned Maine farmer, it’s a chance to experience the bygone mid-20th century era of decadent luxury cruising, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones–or children, for that matter. The Isabella sets sail from Long Beach, CA into calm seas on a two-week retro cruise to Hawaii and back.

But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless fifties, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below decks intrude on the festivities. Down in the main galley, Mick Szabo, a battle-weary Hungarian executive sous-chef, watches escalating tensions among the crew. Meanwhile, Miriam Koslow, an elderly Israeli violinist with the Sabra Quartet, becomes increasingly aware of the age-related vulnerabilities of the ship herself and the cynical corners cut by the cruise ship company, Cabaret.

When a time of crisis begins, Christine, Mick, and Miriam find themselves facing the unknown together in an unexpected and startling test of their characters.]]> 304 Kate Christensen 0385536283 Pat 3 fiction 3.20 2018 The Last Cruise
author: Kate Christensen
name: Pat
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/12
date added: 2024/01/12
shelves: fiction
review:
Not sure how a book with such prosaic writing can also, at times, be overwritten, but this author managed. Also, the significant action didn't start until way past the halfway point - far too late. I give credit for the research the author did about food prep, cruise ships, etc. The end didn't make it clear what ultimately happened to the ship or the characters, and neither did I care.
]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Pat 5 fiction, ireland 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Pat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves: fiction, ireland
review:

]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what � or who � is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Pat 5 ireland, dystopian-absurdist 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Pat
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: ireland, dystopian-absurdist
review:
The most terrifying book, with the most beautiful language, I have ever read.
]]> Shapeshifting 58031622 218 Michelle Ross 1945233109 Pat 4 short-stories, kindle 4.58 Shapeshifting
author: Michelle Ross
name: Pat
average rating: 4.58
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: short-stories, kindle
review:

]]> Not the End of the World 28943 289 Kate Atkinson 0316159379 Pat 0 short-stories 3.75 2002 Not the End of the World
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Pat
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> Cloud Cuckoo Land 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

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

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

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

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

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Pat 5 dystopian-absurdist 4.24 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Pat
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/07
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: dystopian-absurdist
review:
SO beautiful! Don't get too caught up in trying to tie all the pieces together and understanding every little connection. Just let the beauty of the language and gorgeous pictures he paints flood over you. And as for 600+ pages? Not usually my cup of tea, either, but because of how the book is formatted, there are many fewer pages of text, and I, for one, was sorry to see it end.
]]> Motherless Brooklyn 328854 Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.]]> 311 Jonathan Lethem 0345803396 Pat 4 fiction 3.86 1999 Motherless Brooklyn
author: Jonathan Lethem
name: Pat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2016/06/26
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:
I rarely read detective novels, but I'm sure glad I read this one. The plot is almost immaterial, which is fine since I didn't think it was that great. The star of the book was the star of the book, the protagonist, Lionel Essrog, who has Tourettes syndrome. Jonathan Lethem must either have Tourettes himself, be close to someone who does, or have done lots of research and been blessed with a huge dose of empathy. His treatment of Lionel is so understanding, so compassionate and so funny! Plus, his descriptions of Lionel's tics, obsessions and word salads are just a joy to read. Detective novel devotee or not, you gotta read this book.
]]> A Widow for One Year 4659
This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult� woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,� but she will never be forgotten.

Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four.

The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.

A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.

Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
Source: john-irving.com]]> 576 John Irving Pat 3 fiction 3.78 1998 A Widow for One Year
author: John Irving
name: Pat
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2016/07/06
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:
I'll read anything by John Irving; unfortunately I wasn't crazy about this one. I just didn't find any of the characters sympathetic or particularly likable (except Harry) and didn't really care what happened to them. There was one hilarious scene, however, which made it worth reading. Think gardner hanging upside down in a privet with pornographic drawings swirling around him, etc.
]]> Black Dogs 6871
Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encounter forty years earlier - a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time.

In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilisation's darkest moods - its black dogs - with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.]]> 149 Ian McEwan 0385494327 Pat 3 fiction 3.45 1992 Black Dogs
author: Ian McEwan
name: Pat
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2016/07/09
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Son 16240761
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.

Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.

Phillipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli's ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, children are sacrificed in the name of ambition, as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCoulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices.

Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.]]> 561 Philipp Meyer 0062120395 Pat 4 historical-fiction 4.01 2013 The Son
author: Philipp Meyer
name: Pat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/25
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> Lapham Rising 826283 243 Roger Rosenblatt 0060833610 Pat 2 fiction 3.31 2006 Lapham Rising
author: Roger Rosenblatt
name: Pat
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2016/10/04
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Bully of Order 19522890
“The Bully of Order does what only the best works of fiction can do: it brilliantly imagines those parts of life that history all too often fails to record. This is a thoroughly engrossing story told in mesmerizing prose.� —Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

Keen to make his fortune, Jacob Ellstrom, armed with his medical kit and new wife, Nell, lands in The Harbor—a mud-filled, raucous coastal town teeming with rough trade pioneers, sawmill laborers, sailors, and prostitutes. But Jacob is not a doctor, and a botched delivery exposes his ruse, driving him onto the streets in a plunge toward alcoholism. Alone, Nell scrambles to keep herself and their young son, Duncan, safe in this dangerous world. When a tentative reunion between the couple—in the company of Duncan and Jacob’s malicious brother, Matius—results in tragedy, Jacob must flee town to elude being charged with murder.

Years later, the wild and reckless Duncan seems to be yet another of The Harbor’s hoodlums. His only salvation is his overwhelming love for Teresa Boyerton, the daughter of the town’s largest mill owner. But disaster will befall the lovers with heartbreaking consequences.

And across town, Bellhouse, a union boss and criminal rabble-rouser, sits at the helm of The Harbor’s seedy underbelly, perpetuating a cycle of greed and violence. His thug Tartan directs his pack of thieves, pimps, and murderers, and conceals an incendiary secret involving Duncan’s mother. As time passes, a string of calamitous events sends these characters hurtling towards each other in an epic collision that will shake the town to its core.]]> 400 Brian Hart 0062297740 Pat 3 historical-fiction 3.32 2014 The Bully of Order
author: Brian Hart
name: Pat
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2016/11/25
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12)]]> 28220985
Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets. To an old friend and older adversary. It leads the former Chief of Homicide for the Sûreté du Québec to places even he is afraid to go. But must.

And there he finds four young cadets in the Sûreté academy, and a dead professor. And, with the body, a copy of the old, odd map.

Everywhere Gamache turns, he sees Amelia Choquet, one of the cadets. Tattooed and pierced. Guarded and angry. Amelia is more likely to be found on the other side of a police line-up. And yet she is in the academy. A protégée of the murdered professor.

The focus of the investigation soon turns to Gamache himself and his mysterious relationship with Amelia, and his possible involvement in the crime. The frantic search for answers takes the investigators back to Three Pines and a stained glass window with its own horrific secrets.

For both Amelia Choquet and Armand Gamache, the time has come for a great reckoning.

Number-one New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny pulls back the layers to reveal a brilliant and emotionally powerful truth in her latest spellbinding novel.]]> 389 Louise Penny 1250022134 Pat 3 fiction 4.36 2016 A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12)
author: Louise Penny
name: Pat
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2016/12/05
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Ordinary Grace 17063903
When tragedy unexpectedly comes to call on his family, which includes his Methodist minister father, his passionate, artistic mother, Juilliard-bound older sister, and wise-beyond-his years kid brother, Frank finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal.

On the surface, "Ordinary Grace" is the story of the murder of a beautiful young woman, a beloved daughter and sister. At heart, it's the story of what that tragedy does to a boy, his family, and ultimately the fabric of the small town in which he lives. Told from Frank's perspective forty years after that fateful summer, it is a moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.]]> 307 William Kent Krueger 1451645856 Pat 4 fiction 4.34 2013 Ordinary Grace
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Pat
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/19
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Nobody's Fool (Sully #1) 659388
Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.]]> 549 Richard Russo 0679753338 Pat 4 fiction 4.10 1993 Nobody's Fool (Sully #1)
author: Richard Russo
name: Pat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/05
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:
While this might not be considered literary fiction, Russo's writing pulls you right along. His characters are so well fleshed out, and even if you don't like them, you end up loving them. He has such a feel for human foibles - and strengths. A really great read. Oh, and it's also really funny.
]]> Brazzaville Beach 77829
Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelities of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science . . . and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.]]> 320 William Boyd 0380780496 Pat 4 fiction 3.96 1990 Brazzaville Beach
author: William Boyd
name: Pat
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/10
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5) 22693231 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles continues the electrifying story he began in his smashing New York Times bestseller Natchez Burning with this highly anticipated second volume in an epic trilogy of blood and race, family and justice.

Southern prosecutor Penn Cage is caught in the darkest maelstrom of his life. The heartbreaking but seemingly straightforward death of his father's African-American nurse, Viola Turner, has fractured Penn's family and turned Dr. Tom Cage into a fugitive from justice. And in the search for his father and his reasons for running, Penn has unwittingly started a war with a violent offshoot of the KKK, the Double Eagles, whose members seem to know much more about Tom's past than Penn or his mother ever did.

Desperately following his father's trail, Penn finds himself in a maze of mirrors, beset on all sides by a family of criminals and corrupt police whose power reaches into the highest levels of state government. To even the odds, Penn must rely on allies whose objectives are very different from his own. FBI special agent John Kaiser sees Tom Cage as the key to closing not only countless civil rights murders, but also the ultimate cold case: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Penn's fiancée, journalist Caitlin Masters, is chasing the biggest story of her career and believes Tom can lead her to evidence of America's most secret, shameful history. In the end, all roads will lead to the mysterious Bone Tree, a legendary killing site that may conceal far more than the remains of the forgotten.

Penn now knows that the death of Viola Turner is a door to the darkest chapters of America's past. In the civil rights battleground that was 1960s Mississippi and Louisiana, powerful men had audacious, sweeping agendas, and their violent race murders concealed a conspiracy that ran wide and deep, involving the New Orleans Mafia, a Double Eagle hit squad, and a world- altering murder in Dealey Plaza in 1963. And if the FBI can be believed, somehow Dr. Tom Cage stands at the center of it all.

Enthralling, captivating, and utterly engrossing, The Bone Tree is a masterpiece of modern suspense and the next novel in the monumental trilogy that Greg Iles was born to write.]]> 804 Greg Iles 0062311115 Pat 4 historical-fiction 4.21 2015 The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5)
author: Greg Iles
name: Pat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2017/04/07
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
Really violent, but oh so exciting to read and fascinating theory about a terrible time in US history.
]]> The Innocent 10330287 A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham’s intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.]]> 287 Ian McEwan 0307761029 Pat 4 fiction 3.85 1990 The Innocent
author: Ian McEwan
name: Pat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/09
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Man Without a Shadow 25489934
Over the course of thirty years, the two embark on mirrored journeys of self-discovery: Margot, enthralled by her charming, mysterious, and deeply lonely patient, as well as her officious supervisor, attempts to unlock Eli’s shuttered memories of a childhood trauma without losing her own sense of self in the process. Made vivid by Oates� usual eye for detail, and searing insight into the human psyche, The Man Without a Shadow is eerie, ambitious, and structurally complex, unique among her novels for its intimate portrayal of a forbidden relationship that can never be publicly revealed.]]> 385 Joyce Carol Oates 0062416111 Pat 3 fiction 3.15 2016 The Man Without a Shadow
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Pat
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2017/06/07
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall]]> 226369 328 Anna Funder 1862076553 Pat 5 nonfiction, spies_wwii 4.20 2003 Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
author: Anna Funder
name: Pat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/07
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: nonfiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

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

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Pat 4 fiction, dystopian-absurdist 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Pat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/31
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, dystopian-absurdist
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2)]]> 4912857
The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows � my new windows � each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen�

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed � a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.

Once again, Zafon takes us into a dark, gothic universe first seen in The Shadow of the Wind and creates a breathtaking adventure of intrigue, romance, and tragedy. Through a dizzyingly constructed labyrinth of secrets, the magic of books, passion, and friendship blend into a masterful story.
(jacket)]]> 531 Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn 0385528701 Pat 4 3.94 2008 The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2)
author: Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn
name: Pat
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/04
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, kindle, crime-adventure
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Form and Emptiness]]> 57004637 A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.

And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.]]> 548 Ruth Ozeki 0399563644 Pat 5 fiction, dystopian-absurdist 4.01 2021 The Book of Form and Emptiness
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Pat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/13
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, dystopian-absurdist
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Pat 3 fiction, dystopian-absurdist 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Pat
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/09
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, dystopian-absurdist
review:

]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 303 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Pat 5 fiction, dystopian-absurdist 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Pat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/01
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, dystopian-absurdist
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)]]> 7929891
London, England: Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

River Cartwright, one such “slow horse,� is bitter about his failure and about his tedious assignment transcribing cell phone conversations. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers� connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone has his own agenda.]]> 320 Mick Herron 1569479011 Pat 4 fiction, spies_wwii 3.95 2010 Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)
author: Mick Herron
name: Pat
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/30
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> Dead Lions (Slough House, #2) 15823478
The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts. 

But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?]]> 348 Mick Herron 1616952253 Pat 5 fiction, spies_wwii 4.03 2013 Dead Lions (Slough House, #2)
author: Mick Herron
name: Pat
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/01
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: fiction, spies_wwii
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Pat 5 nonfiction, crime-adventure 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Pat
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: nonfiction, crime-adventure
review:

]]> Winter Work 57696222 352 Dan Fesperman 0593321618 Pat 4 4.11 2022 Winter Work
author: Dan Fesperman
name: Pat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/27
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: spies_wwii, historical-fiction
review:

]]> Deacon King Kong 51045613 The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.]]> 370 James McBride 073521672X Pat 4 fiction 4.11 2020 Deacon King Kong
author: James McBride
name: Pat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/25
date added: 2023/12/25
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> A Tale of Two Cities 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 Pat 5 classics 3.86 1859 A Tale of Two Cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Pat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: classics
review:

]]> Great Expectations 2623
Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations, one of Dickens's most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.

This edition includes the original, discarded ending, Dickens's brief working notes, and the serial instalments and chapter divisions in different editions. It also uses the definitive Clarendon text.]]> 544 Charles Dickens 0192833596 Pat 4 classics 3.78 1861 Great Expectations
author: Charles Dickens
name: Pat
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1861
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: classics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11]]> 110890
The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.

As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life--he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence--and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies.

Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.]]> 469 Lawrence Wright 037541486X Pat 5 nonfiction, history 4.34 2006 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Pat
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves: nonfiction, history
review:

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