en-US Fri, 09 May 2025 08:27:38 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 12968770 282 N.T. Wright 0061730572 Your Excellency 0 4.23 2012
author: N.T. Wright
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 61089492
Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.]]> 224 Paul Harding 132403629X Your Excellency 5 3.73 2023
author: Paul Harding
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/03
date added: 2025/05/08
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]]> 904268 366 Ruth Ozeki 0670879045 Your Excellency 5 3.86 1998
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/07
date added: 2025/05/07
shelves: read-2023, read-2025, read-more-than-once
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]]> 264981
This sparkling mosaic of our country, in all its wild and poignant charm,Ěý“may be the best road trip you’ll ever take—full of strange vision, hilarious detours, and sudden beauty in unlikely placesâ€� ( The New Yorker ).Ěý

Reporting for Outside , The New Yorker , and NPR,Ěýamong other national media, the award-winning journalist has established a reputation not only as a wry observer of the contemporary American scene but also as one of our more inventive and versatile practitioners of narrative non-fiction.

In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of an apparent cabal of fabulously powerful military-industrialists, drop in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and join a giant techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a diverse gallery of American visionaries� from the impossibly perky founder of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell Means to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the route of the historic Bataan Death March with veterans from Sides� acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost Soldiers . Sides also examines the nation that has emerged from the ashes of September 11, recounting the harrowing journeys of three World Trade Center survivors and deciding at the last possible minute not to "embed" on the Iraqi front-lines with the U.S. Marines.]]> 450 Hampton Sides 1400033551 Your Excellency 0 3.76 2004
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 199458188
So begins the life of John the a matchless scholar and scribe of Fulda, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge of the old and new languages of Europe, theology and Church law - and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful (and deadly) currency.

And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known - and loved.]]> 234 Emily Maguire Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.94 2024
author: Emily Maguire
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 17885263 463 Hampton Sides Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 4.43 2010
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> 139069 The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age.

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

First edition: here.]]> 282 Alfred Lansing Your Excellency 3 4.42 1959
author: Alfred Lansing
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/05
date added: 2025/05/05
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]]> 212081513
When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore—on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans. Hans appeared to have been there for a while and could quickly educate the Walkers and their crew on the island’s resources. But Hans had a secret . . . and as the Walker family gradually came to learn more, what seemed like a stroke of luck to have the mysterious man’s assistance became something ominous, something darker.

Like David Grann and Stacy Schiff, Matthew Pearl unveils one of the most incredible yet little-known historical true stories, and the only known instance in history of an actual family of castaways. Save Our Souls asks us to consider who we might become if we found ourselves trapped on a deserted island.]]> 272 Matthew Pearl 0063338068 Your Excellency 0 3.15 2025
author: Matthew Pearl
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 109487 A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won - a Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory

In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. He had come to see if the rumors were true—if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished—but what did the arrival of these “New Men� portend for the Navajo?

Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West,� in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as “Manifest Destiny.� For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them.]]> 460 Hampton Sides 0385507771 Your Excellency 0 currently-reading 4.25 2006
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> 215807543 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERĚýâ€� From a renowned National Book Award–winning scholar, an extraordinary new account of the life of Jesus that explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world.

“This a brilliant and necessary book. Sober, wise, respectful, and fearless."Ěý—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

"Pagels� story is for believers and non-believers alike.� —Tara Westover, author of Educated

"The depth of spirituality she uncovers is profound.� —The New York Times Book Review

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.

The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus's followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?

The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus's life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn't illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus's body wasn't humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn't a failed messiah, his kingdom is a he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers' numbers grow.

In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract.]]> 290 Elaine Pagels 0385547498 Your Excellency 0 to-read 4.23
author: Elaine Pagels
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.23
book published:
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]]> 17349119
Shandi doesn’t know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It’s been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn’t define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice.

Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, in a funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness,; about a virgin birth, a sacrifice, and a resurrection; about falling in love, and learning that things aren’t always what they seem—or what we hope they will be. It’s a novel about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need]]> 320 Joshilyn Jackson 0062105655 Your Excellency 4 read-2017, to-read-again 3.63 2013
author: Joshilyn Jackson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2017/06/16
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: read-2017, to-read-again
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]]> 2319645 332 N.T. Wright 0061551821 Your Excellency 3 read-2023, owned, re-reading 4.30 2007
author: N.T. Wright
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/07
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: read-2023, owned, re-reading
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]]> 22024490 The life of the first-century man born Saul of Tarsus, who went on to become Paul the Apostle, by the acclaimed historian and author of Thermopylae. Paul, born into Asia Minor’s Jewish aristocracy and a passionate student of scripture, was part of the crowd that killed Stephen, a deacon regarded as the first Christian martyr. But on the road to Damascus, Paul experienced a miracle that would change his life and in turn change history. His conversion left him convinced that his true master was the man who would come to be known as Jesus Christ. Drawing on his vast command of ancient history and blending it with superb storytelling skills, author Ernle Bradford weaves a tale that takes the reader from city to city as Paul spreads the teachings of Christ despite being beaten, stoned, and shipwrecked. It’s a thrilling tale and stirring biography of a man whose devotion and rhetorical genius laid the groundwork for the religion that soon swept the civilized world. Written by a historian known for immersing himself in his subjects, which range from the ancient world to World War II, this is a fascinating look at the convert who helped shape Christianity as a worldwide force. Ěý±Ő±Ő> 288 Ernle Bradford 1497625785 Your Excellency 4 4.04 1974
author: Ernle Bradford
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, read-2025
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]]> 39723730
"[Grann is] one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine

Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history.

Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world.

In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." Illustrated with more than fifty stunning photographs from Worsley's and Shackleton's journeys, The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity.]]> 160 David Grann 038554457X Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.88 2018
author: David Grann
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 193388249
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And this was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.]]> 338 David Grann 0593470834 Your Excellency 0 4.12 2017
author: David Grann
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Your Excellency 1 4.04 2023
author: Amanda Peters
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 4.25 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> 213395531 The thrilling narrative of how New York came to be, by the author of the beloved classic The Island at the Center of the World.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan.

Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an the result not of an English military takeover but of clever negotiations that led to a fusion of the multiethnic capitalistic society the Dutch had pioneered to the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. Taking Manhattan shows how the paradox of New York’s origins—boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement—reflect America’s promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as “astonishing� (New York Times) and “revelatory� (New York magazine), has once again mined newly translated sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings.]]> 408 Russell Shorto 0393881164 Your Excellency 4 read-2025 4.21 2025
author: Russell Shorto
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: read-2025
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]]> 58722281
Modern pastors and their flocks have long considered N. T. Wright a role model for being a thoughtful Christian in today’s world. His bestselling books, including Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, Simply Jesus, and After You Believe, have guided Christians in their belief and practice of the faith. Now, Christians can rely on his wisdom to guide them through each day of their lives with this thoughtful book of daily meditations, featuring short selections from his classic works.Ěý

ĚýWith reflections on themes such as faith, mission, character, and God’s work in the world, these daily meditations will invigorate and uplift Christians in their search to live their faith authentically and biblically in today’s world.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 387 N.T. Wright 0063210908 Your Excellency 0 4.27
author: N.T. Wright
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 214537790 FromĚýPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingĚýauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

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

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 4.01 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

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

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Your Excellency 0 3.86 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 138929
When the Emperor Contstantine converted to Christianity in 368 AD, he changed the course of European history in ways that continue to have repercussions to the present day. Adopting those aspects of the religion that suited his purposes, he turned Rome on a course from the relatively open, tolerant and pluralistic civilization of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority, whether that of the Bible, or the writings of Ptolemy in astronomy and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. Only a thousand years later, with the advent of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern science, did Europe begin to free itself from the effects of Constantine's decision, yet the effects of his establishment of Christianity as a state religion remain with us, in many respects, today. Brilliantly wide-ranging and ambitious, this is a major work of history.]]> 432 Charles Freeman 1400033802 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 4.05 2002
author: Charles Freeman
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: maybe-to-read
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]]> 101673225 The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.]]> 240 C Pam Zhang 0593538242 Your Excellency 5 ]]> 3.50 2023
author: C Pam Zhang
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: read-2023, available-as-library-audiobook, kindle-books-and-want-to-read, kindle-books-to-read, owned, read-2025, read-more-than-once
review:
March, 2025: Like the perfect recipe - even better the second time around!

]]> 252669
In 1906, a beautiful seventeen year old postulant enters the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in upstate New York. When she begins to bleed from her hands, feet, and side, the entire community is thrown into turmoil. Is Mariette a cunning sham, or sexually hysterical, or does God stalk her like a pitiless lover?

Mariette in Ecstasy is a stunning immersion into the society of a small convent at the turn of the century, where a mysterious and ultimately harrowing world lies beneath the lovely, placid surface of everyday life. With Mariette In Ecstasy, critically acclaimed author Ron Hansen again powerfully demonstrates his gift for brilliantly recreating time and place. As intriguing as The Name Of The Rose, as sensually hypnotic as Marguerite Duras' The Lover, this is an intimate portrait of a fascinating young woman in the grip of an intractable fate, and it raises provocative questions about the complex nature of passionate faith.

Exquisitely crafted, Mariette in Ecstasy is a spellbinding novel that marks a new level of achievement in one of our most gifted writers.

~ from 1991 hardcover dustjacket]]> 180 Ron Hansen 0060981180 Your Excellency 0 3.75 1991
author: Ron Hansen
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 9449985 The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.

At the end of the seventeenth century—an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London—when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, when the natural land the supernatural still twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new. These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws�-a contradiction that tormented them and changed the course of history.

The Clockwork Universe is the fascinating and compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the men who made the modern world.]]> 378 Edward Dolnick 006171951X Your Excellency 0 3.94 2011
author: Edward Dolnick
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> 22929570 . What could drive a girl on the cusp of womanhood to lock herself away from the world forever?

Sarah is just seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a cell that measures only seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth as well as pressure to marry the local lord's son, she decides to renounce the world--with all its dangers, desires, and temptations--and commit herself to a life of prayer.

But it soon becomes clear that the thick, unforgiving walls of Sarah's cell cannot protect her as well as she had thought. With the outside world clamoring to get in and the intensity of her isolation driving her toward drastic actions, even madness, her body and soul are still in grave danger. When she starts hearing the voice of the previous anchoress whispering to her from the walls, Sarah finds herself questioning what she thought she knew about the anchorhold, and about the village itself.

With the lyricism of Nicola Griffith's Hild and the vivid historical setting of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, Robyn Cadwallader's powerful debut novel tells an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear, and the very human need for connection and touch. Compelling, evocative, and haunting, The Anchoress is both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.]]> 320 Robyn Cadwallader 0374104255 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.60 2015
author: Robyn Cadwallader
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 222532771 From the renowned Booker Prize winner and nationally bestselling author of Snow comes a richly atmospheric new mystery about a woman’s sudden disappearance in a small coastal town in Ireland, where nothing is as it seems.

"John Banville is one of my favorite writers alive, and I pick up his books whenever I need a reminder how to write a good sentence.”—R.F. Kuang

“He had seen drowned people. A sight not to be forgotten.�

1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn’t approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea.

Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally—the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke—a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways. But as the case unfolds, events from the past resurface that may have life-altering ramifications for all involved.

At once a searing mystery and a profound meditation on the hidden worlds we all inhabit,ĚýThe DrownedĚýis the next great Strafford and QuirkeĚýnovel from a beloved writer at the top of his game.]]> John Banville 0571370837 Your Excellency 2 read-2025 3.36 2024
author: John Banville
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 423536
One part Heart of Darkness , one part Lewis and Clark, Brutal Journey tells the story of a group of explorers who came to the new world on the heels of Cortés; bound for glory, only four of four hundred would survive. Eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes� gold-drenched Mexico.

The four survivors of the Narváez expeditionĚýbrought nothing back from their sojourn other than their story, but what a tale it was. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters, and finally, when there were only the four of them left in the high Texas desert, they became itinerate messiahs. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive long enough to inch their way toward Mexico, the only place where they were certain they would find an outpost of the Spanish empire.

The journey of the Cabeza De Vaca expedition is one of the greatest survival epics in the history of American exploration. By drawing on the accounts of the first explorers and the most recent findings of archaeologists and academic historians, Paul Schneider offers a thrilling and authentic narrative to replace a legend of North American exploration.]]> 366 Paul Schneider 080506835X Your Excellency 3 3.96 2000
author: Paul Schneider
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, available-from-library
review:

]]> 12129323
Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground—when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories—like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.]]> 496 Scott Weidensaul 0151015155 Your Excellency 0 3.98 2012
author: Scott Weidensaul
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 447457
The tall, freckled explorer with the aquiline nose, whose flaming red hair long ago turned gray, passes his days in prayer and rumination, trying to ignore the waterfront gallows that are all too visible from his cell. And he plots for one great escape, one last voyage to the ends of the earth, one final chance to prove himself. What follows is one of history's most epic -- and forgotten -- adventures. Columbus himself would later claim that his fourth voyage was his greatest. It was without doubt his most treacherous. Of the four ships he led into the unknown, none returned. Columbus would face the worst storms a European explorer had ever encountered. He would battle to survive amid mutiny, war, and a shipwreck that left him stranded on a desert isle for almost a year.

On his tail were his enemies, sent from Europe to track him down. In front of the unknown. Martin Dugard's thrilling account of this final voyage brings Columbus to life as never before-adventurer, businessman, father, lover, tyrant, and hero.]]> 322 Martin Dugard 0316154563 Your Excellency 3 3.96 2005
author: Martin Dugard
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 40545956 In this gorgeously stunning debut, a mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises.

The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles. With concerns about the child’s home situation, Jo reluctantly agrees to let her stay―just until she learns more about Ursa’s past.

Jo enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the mystery of the charming child. But the more time they spend together, the more questions they have. How does a young girl not only read but understand Shakespeare? Why do good things keep happening in her presence? And why aren’t Jo and Gabe checking the missing children’s website anymore?

Though the three have formed an incredible bond, they know difficult choices must be made. As the summer nears an end and Ursa gets closer to her fifth miracle, her dangerous past closes in. When it finally catches up to them, all of their painful secrets will be forced into the open, and their fates will be left to the stars.]]> 332 Glendy Vanderah 154204006X Your Excellency 2 3.98 2019
author: Glendy Vanderah
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 22328555 432 Steven Weinberg 0062346652 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.78 2015
author: Steven Weinberg
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.Ěý

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Your Excellency 5 read-2013 So now, in my dotage, I come across a book that stirs those ancient feelings and bring back a lot of that way of looking at things. Very refreshing and enjoyable. And combine that with some magical realism and a fine storytelling style, and you come up with this wonderful presentation.
Ms. Ozeki alternates between the voices of Nao (pun intended, I guess), who is, or was, a 16-year-old American-Japanese girl; and the eponymous voice of Ruth living in the American Northwest, reading Nao's writings. Nao in turn is telling much about her 104-year-old great-grandmother, who was an anarchical, liberated Zen Buddist nun. Well, yeah. Believe me, it all works, and you will be immersed in all these lives and come to care about them all. Be sure to watch all the time references as they go by, too.
There are times when you wonder when the reality left the building, and whether you're reading about an alternate time or world, or just reading this life from a different perspective. I like that mix. At times I was put in mind of Haruki Murakami's writing, especially 1Q84, although 1Q84's alternate realities are much less subtle than Ms. Ozeki's. Nice job, Ms. Ruth. Domo arigatou gozaimasu!]]> 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2013/07/04
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: read-2013
review:
Oh, what to say about this book!? There are many fine plot summaries around. I especially liked the . But for me, there was a more sublime experience. I spent (or mis-spent) some youthful years reading a lot of Zen Buddist books, especially those of Alan Watts. I loved the Zen perspective on life and life's futilities, and its sense that time is malleable and non-linear.
So now, in my dotage, I come across a book that stirs those ancient feelings and bring back a lot of that way of looking at things. Very refreshing and enjoyable. And combine that with some magical realism and a fine storytelling style, and you come up with this wonderful presentation.
Ms. Ozeki alternates between the voices of Nao (pun intended, I guess), who is, or was, a 16-year-old American-Japanese girl; and the eponymous voice of Ruth living in the American Northwest, reading Nao's writings. Nao in turn is telling much about her 104-year-old great-grandmother, who was an anarchical, liberated Zen Buddist nun. Well, yeah. Believe me, it all works, and you will be immersed in all these lives and come to care about them all. Be sure to watch all the time references as they go by, too.
There are times when you wonder when the reality left the building, and whether you're reading about an alternate time or world, or just reading this life from a different perspective. I like that mix. At times I was put in mind of Haruki Murakami's writing, especially 1Q84, although 1Q84's alternate realities are much less subtle than Ms. Ozeki's. Nice job, Ms. Ruth. Domo arigatou gozaimasu!
]]> 57150885 A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both—the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki.

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-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. 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.]]> 560 Ruth Ozeki 0399563652 Your Excellency 5 4.23 2021
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: read-2022, avail-on-overdrive-audio, read-2025, read-more-than-once, top-32
review:
Even better the second time I read it. Magnificent!!
]]> 213870076
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853945 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.90 2025
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 193845
From the earliest recorded appearance of the disease in the sixteenth century, to the eighteenth century, where a man had only half a chance of surviving the scourge, to the early nineteenth century, when the British conquered scurvy and successfully blockaded the French and defeated Napoleon, Scurvy is a medical detective story for the ages, the fascinating true story of how James Lind (the surgeon), James Cook (the mariner), and Gilbert Blane (the gentleman) worked separately to eliminate the dreaded affliction.

Scurvy is an evocative journey back to the era of wooden ships and sails, when the disease infiltrated every aspect of seafaring life: press gangs "recruit" mariners on the way home from a late night at the pub; a terrible voyage in search of riches ends with a hobbled fleet and half the crew heaved overboard; Cook majestically travels the South Seas but suffers an unimaginable fate. Brimming with tales of ships, sailors, and baffling bureaucracy, Scurvy is a rare mix of compelling history and classic adventure story.]]> 272 Stephen R. Bown 0312313926 Your Excellency 0 3.74 2003
author: Stephen R. Bown
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 127777
When the first edition of America in the Gilded Age was published in 1984, it soon acquired the status of a classic, and was widely acknowledged as the first comprehensive account of the latter half of the nineteenth century to appear in many years. Sean Dennis Cashman traces the political and social saga of America as it passed through the momentous transformation of the Industrial Revolution and the settlement of the West. Revised and extended chapters focusing on immigration, labor, the great cities, and the American Renaissance are accompanied by a wealth of augmented and enhanced illustrations, many new to this addition.]]> 425 Sean Dennis Cashman 0814714951 Your Excellency 0 3.75 1993
author: Sean Dennis Cashman
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 43218019 In the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible and State of Wonder, a novel set in the rainforest of Ecuador about five women left behind when their missionary husbands are killed. Based on the shocking real-life events

In 1956, a small group of evangelical Christian missionaries and their families journeyed to the rainforest in Ecuador intending to convert the Waorani, a people who had never had contact with the outside world. The plan was known as Operation Auca. After spending days dropping gifts from an aircraft, the five men in the party rashly entered the “intangible zone.� They were all killed, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves.

Five Wives is the fictionalized account of the real-life women who were left behind, and their struggles � with grief, with doubt, and with each other � as they continued to pursue their evangelical mission in the face of the explosion of fame that followed their husbands� deaths.

Five Wives is a riveting, often wrenching story of evangelism and its legacy, teeming with atmosphere and compelling characters and rich in emotional impact.

Ěý±Ő±Ő> 400 Joan Thomas 1443458546 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.55 2019
author: Joan Thomas
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 165099
In 2002, Bill Zehme landed one of the most coveted assignments for a magazine writer: an interview with Johnny Carson—the only one he’d granted since retiring from hosting The Tonight Show a decade earlier. Zehme was tapped for the Esquire feature story thanks to his years of legendary celebrity profiles, and the resulting piece portrayed Carson as more human being than showbiz legend. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005 and urged on by many of those closest to Carson, Zehme signed a contract to do an expansive biography. He toiled on the book for nearly a decade—interviewing dozens of Carson’s colleagues and friends and filling up a storage locker with his voluminous research—before a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatments halted his progress. When he died in 2023 his obituaries mentioned the Carson book, with New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman calling it “one of the great unfinished biographies.�

Yet the hundreds of pages Zehme managed to complete are astounding both for the caliber of their writing and how they illuminate one of the most inscrutable figures in entertainment history: A man who brought so much joy and laughter to so many millions but was himself exceedingly shy and private. Zehme traces Carson’s rise from a magic-obsessed Nebraska boy to a Navy ensign in World War II to a burgeoning radio and TV personality to, eventually, host of The Tonight Show—which he transformed, along with the entirety of American popular culture, over the next three decades. Without Carson, there would be no late-night television as we know it. On a much more intimate level, Zehme also captures the turmoil and anguish that accompanied the success: four marriages, troubles with alcohol, and the devastating loss of a child.

In one passage, Zehme notes that when asked by an interviewer in the mid-80s for the secret to his success, Carson replied simply, “Be yourself and tell the truth.� Completed with help from journalist and Zehme’s former research assistant Mike Thomas, Carson the Magnificent offers just that: an honest assessment of who Johnny Carson really was.]]> Bill Zehme 0739324144 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.18
author: Bill Zehme
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.18
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 23013 FROM THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY

Richard Powers' novel is a fascinating and profound exploration of the interaction of an individual human life and a corporate one. It tells two stories: the first that of an American company, which starts as a small family soap and candle-making firm in the early 1800s, and ends as a vast pharmaceuticals-to-pesticides combine in the 1990s. The second is that of a contemporary woman, living in the company town, who during the course of the novel is diagnosed and then finally dies of cancer, a cancer that is almost certainly caused by exposure to chemical wastes from the company's factories.

Richly intellectually stimulating, deeply moving and beautifully written, Gain is very much a 'Great American Novel', an exploration of the history, uniqueness and soul of America, in the tradition of Underworld. But it is most reminiscent of Graham Swift's Waterland, another novel that combines history, both public and private, with contemporary lives, showing how individuals are both the victims and shapers of large-scale historical and economic forces]]> 355 Richard Powers 0099284464 Your Excellency 5
Gain provides an in-depth, fascinating history of the development of a soap company, from humble 18th-century beginnings to a modern conglomerate. His craft is so good that he makes this story, and those who populate it, compelling, interesting, and worthy of the reader's care. At the same time, Powers tracks the decline of a current-day real estate agent whose life and family are being ravaged by internal and external cancers. This isn't an Erin Brockovich tale, though - Laura Bodley is living her life and her death, and we get to know Laura well and care much about her and her family.

And then there's the writing - I was so glad I had a lot of time, because his writing is to be savored, not rushed. There's an art here that's rare - each sentence is crafted, not just penned. Gain reminded me of why I loved his The Echo Maker so much, and it was wonderful to feel that again.]]> 3.77 1998
author: Richard Powers
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: read-2013, read-2025, read-more-than-once
review:
Richard Powers' Gain exemplifies the kind of book I love to read - a beautifully written narrative combined with a compelling story - in this case two disparate stories that are headed for each other.

Gain provides an in-depth, fascinating history of the development of a soap company, from humble 18th-century beginnings to a modern conglomerate. His craft is so good that he makes this story, and those who populate it, compelling, interesting, and worthy of the reader's care. At the same time, Powers tracks the decline of a current-day real estate agent whose life and family are being ravaged by internal and external cancers. This isn't an Erin Brockovich tale, though - Laura Bodley is living her life and her death, and we get to know Laura well and care much about her and her family.

And then there's the writing - I was so glad I had a lot of time, because his writing is to be savored, not rushed. There's an art here that's rare - each sentence is crafted, not just penned. Gain reminded me of why I loved his The Echo Maker so much, and it was wonderful to feel that again.
]]> 214709016 The bestsellingĚýauthor of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to uncover the secrets locked in the ice and profoundly shift our understanding of life, the cosmos, and our future on the planet.

For three decades, renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms and faced the limits of human endurance to explore questions of how life survived and adapted, and what our future on a changing planet may hold.

Scientific discoveries at Earth’s polar regions have changed the way we see the world and these insights are becoming ever more urgent. These landscapes are the epicenter for rapid change to our planet, with ice retreating, animal species moving toward the equator or going extinct, Indigenous communities confronting dramatic environmental changes, and political battles heating up for newly accessible mineral and gas resources. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—events there in the coming years will affect all life and every nation on the planet.ĚýThe book blends travel, science, and environmental writing to deepen our understanding of animal and plant life, the history of our ice ages, the age of dinosaurs, the history of Western exploration, and the clues meteorites preserved at the poles contain about the cosmos.Ěý

Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Shubin shares lively adventure stories from the field to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions and to reveal the poles� impact on the rest of life on the planet.]]> 288 Neil Shubin 0593186524 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 4.22 2025
author: Neil Shubin
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 94799
In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture. Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.]]> 344 Hampton Sides 038549565X Your Excellency 0 abandoned 4.23 2001
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 150778892 368 Sander van der Linden 1324074701 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.67 2023
author: Sander van der Linden
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

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

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

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.83 2023
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

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

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

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

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Your Excellency 3 read-2025 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 20897517
Two years into the voyage, the Jeannette's hull was breached by an impassable stretch of pack ice, forcing the crew to abandon ship amid torrents of rushing of water. Hours later, the ship had sunk below the surface, marooning the men a thousand miles north of Siberia, where they faced a terrifying march with minimal supplies across the endless ice pack.

Enduring everything from snow blindness and polar bears to ferocious storms and labyrinths of ice, the crew battled madness and starvation as they struggled desperately to survive. With thrilling twists and turns, In The Kingdom of Ice is a tale of heroism and determination in the most brutal place on Earth.]]> 454 Hampton Sides 0385535376 Your Excellency 5 read-2025 4.25 2014
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 3136288 Man in the Dark is Paul Auster’s brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill’s story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death.

Passionate and shocking, Man in the Dark is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

*Time Out (Chicago)]]> 180 Paul Auster 0571240763 Your Excellency 3 read-2025 3.64 2008
author: Paul Auster
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Your Excellency 2 read-2025 3.34 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 29939084 An urgent, propulsive novel about a woman learning to negotiate her ailment and its various aftereffects via the simulacrum of a perfect romantic relationship

In Catherine Lacey’s ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the “Girlfriend Experiment,� the brainchild of an eccentric actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship—even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the “Emotional Girlfriend”—certainly better than the “Anger Girlfriend� or the “Maternal Girlfriend”—and is pulled into Kurt’s ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection.

Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.]]> 304 Catherine Lacey 0374100268 Your Excellency 2 read-2025 3.29 2017
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 18490560
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.

Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?

The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.]]> 244 Catherine Lacey 0374534497 Your Excellency 4 read-2025 3.31 2014
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: read-2025
review:

]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Your Excellency 5 4.47 2024
author: Hampton Sides
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 208545196
Seven years of chaos called the Tribulation. A cruel and cunning Antichrist. The dreaded battle of Armageddon. These images and ideas associated with prophecy can be stimulating but also unnecessarily scary. Max Lucado believes God wants us to be prepared, not scared. In his first book exploring the end of this age, Max provides a wise, well-researched, and reassuring overview of what God's Word has to say on a topic that often creates confusion and anxiety.

Max explores four big ideas that will provide a solid foundation for understanding God's plans and will remind us that we are headed to a far better place than where we started. He explains that

we were made to reign with Christ;ĚýGod has made and will keep his promises;Ěýheaven has a timeline; andĚýa golden era, the millennium, awaits God's children.ĚýĚý

In a world filled with political tension, personal trials, and international turbulence, we find ourselves drawn to exploring what happens next on heaven's timeline. Whether readers find themselves in the "I can't wait," "I'm almost ready," or "I'm not sure about all of this" camp, they will be encouraged to ponder God's plans and promises for the future. In Max's signature encouraging style, he reminds us, "It's all about hope. It's all about him."Ěý±Ő±Ő> 256 Max Lucado 1400260000 Your Excellency 5 4.55
author: Max Lucado
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 205363936 In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, shines a light in every corner of New York City.Boom! A June morning on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Suddenly, where a five-story building had stood is nothing but fuming low hills of rubble, the cars parked in front pancaked and coated in ash. Sirens. Havoc. Confusion. Destruction. And people missing.Richard Price, our greatest chronicler of the city today, describes the effect of the disaster on the outer and inner lives of a rich and compelling group of characters. Anthony Walker is pulled from the rubble and, miraculously, survives, to find himself inspired by a religious sense of mission. Royal Lyons, who owns a failing funeral parlor, discovers a new lease on life. And Mary Roe, a hard-bitten NYPD detective, embarks on a personal quest to find a man who is missing.Price's first novel since the bestselling Lush Life presents a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and incredible drama, Lazarus Man is a compelling work of suspense and social vision by one of our preeminent writers.]]> 352 Richard Price 0374168156 Your Excellency 3 read-2024 3.44 2024
author: Richard Price
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 193781998 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actuallyĚýliving?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 Your Excellency 4 read-2024 3.50 2024
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 49869220 Set on a remote Scottish island, this “piercing, vivid, and humane story depict[s] the long aftermath of extreme domestic violenceâ€� (Kirkus Reviews). Nobody knows why John Baird, a quiet family man, took it into his head one day to pick up a shotgun and murder his wife and children. On the Scottish island of Litta, violent crime is unheard of, and the killings send shockwaves through this tiny community in which the Bairds were well-known and liked. Ěý Tommy, the only survivor of the terrible crime, has come back to Litta many years later. Faced with this reminder of the horrors that took place amongst them, the community must ask themselves again if anyone can truly know their neighbors. What drives a man to murder his own family? And to what extent is Tommy his father’s son? Ěý With unflinching candor and powerful prose, Our Fathers interrogates the damaging legacy of toxic masculinity, and reveals how family can both wound us and help us heal.]]> 261 Rebecca Wait 160945572X Your Excellency 0 4.16 2020
author: Rebecca Wait
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, abandoned
review:

]]> 344326 464 Edwin S. Gaustad 0060630566 Your Excellency 4 3.76 1966
author: Edwin S. Gaustad
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, owned, available-on-kindle, kindle-books-have-read, read-2024
review:

]]> 51542370
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.

Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters� true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.]]> 224 Catherine Lacey 0374230927 Your Excellency 5 3.71 2020
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: read-2020, top-11, top-32, read-2024, read-more-than-once
review:
If only I had more that 5 stars...Please - read it!
]]> 25
Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.]]> 304 Bill Bryson 076790382X Your Excellency 5 3.90 1998
author: Bill Bryson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: kindle-books-to-read, read-2024
review:

]]> 55978417 With over 3 million sold, The Story tells the grandest, most compelling story of all time!

God goes to great lengths to rescue lost and hurting people. That is what The Story is all about: the story of the Bible, God's great love affair with humanity. Condensed into 31 accessible chapters, The Story sweeps you into the unfolding progression of Bible characters and events from Genesis to Revelation. UsingĚýthe world’s most popular modern-English Bible, the New International Version, and printed in the exclusive Zondervan NIV Comfort Print® typeface, it allows the stories, poems, and teachings of the Bible to read like a novel. Like any good story, The Story is filled with intrigue, drama, conflict, romance, and redemption—and this story’s true!

Features:


Selections from the accurate, readable, and clear New International Version (NIV)
Events, characters, and teachings of the Bible are arranged chronologically
Short transitions between each chapter to connect the reader to the continuing story
Timelines of Bible events
Foreword by Max Lucado and Randy Frazee
List of characters and who they are
Discussion questions for each chapter
Exclusive Zondervan NIV Comfort Print typeface
11.5-point print size
The Story can be read on its own, used in a small group, or as part of the 31-week church wide-campaign. Companion curriculum is also available.

Using the accurate, readable, and clear New International Version (NIV) text makes the Bible accessible and easy to read. The NIV is the result of over 50 years of work by the Committee on Bible Translation, who oversee the efforts of many contributing scholars. Representing the spectrum of evangelicalism, the translators come from a wide range of denominations and various countries and continually review new research to ensure the NIV remains at the forefront of accessibility, relevance, and authority. Every NIV Bible that is purchased helps Biblica translate and give Bibles to people in need around the world.]]> 512 Zondervan 0310458196 Your Excellency 4 4.46
author: Zondervan
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: kindle-books-have-read, read-2012, kindle-books-to-read, to-read-again
review:

]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.72 2023
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 12844430
Narrated by the author.]]> 9 Jenny Lawson 1611760852 Your Excellency 4 read-2012 3.95 2012
author: Jenny Lawson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/10/08
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: read-2012
review:
A bit foul-mouthed, but very, very funny. Go for the audio version if you can - Jenny reads it herself, and it adds a lot!
]]> 212343501
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 135 Samantha Harvey Your Excellency 5 3.65 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, read-2024
review:

]]> 199318371
Think you know your kings and queens? Think again.

In UNRULY, David Mitchell explores how England's monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects' destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear today in their portraits.

Taking us right back to King Arthur (spoiler: he didn't exist), David tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I (spoiler: she dies). It's a tale of narcissists, inadequate self-control, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and at least one total Cnut, as the population evolved from having their crops nicked by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed king.

How this happened, who it happened to and why it matters in modern Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history - and won't let it off the hook for the mess it's made.

A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here - and who is to blame.

Read by David Mitchell.

Listening length: 11 hours and 39 minutes.]]> 433 David Mitchell Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 4.10 2023
author: David Mitchell
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 57941459 An epic literary thriller set where America is right now, in which a band of unlikely heroes sets out on a quest to save one innocent life—and might end up saving us all.

Something is happening to teenagers across America, spreading through memes only they can parse.

At the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, in a suburb of Chicago, Simon Oliver is trying to recover from his sister’s tragic passing. He breaks out to join a woman named Louise and a man called The Prophet on a quest as urgent as it is enigmatic. Who lies at the end of the road? A man known as The Wizard, whose past encounter with Louise sparked her own collapse. Their quest becomes a rescue mission when they join up with a man whose sister is being held captive by the Wizard, impregnated and imprisoned in a tower.

Noah Hawley’s new novel is anĚýadventure that finds unquenchable lights in dark corners. Unforgettably vivid characters and a plot as fast and bright as pop cinema blend in a Vonnegutian story that is as timeless as a Grimm’s fairy tale. It is a leap into the idiosyncratic pulse of the American heart, written with the bravado, literary power, and feverish foresight that have made Hawley one of our most essential writers.]]> 427 Noah Hawley 1538711516 Your Excellency 5 3.43 2022
author: Noah Hawley
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: owned, read-2022, available-as-library-audiobook, available-on-nook, read-2024, read-more-than-once
review:

]]> 195790688
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern―something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.

During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s Florida Diary is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 037461220X Your Excellency 1 read-2024 3.41 2024
author: Laura van den Berg
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 199793426 Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.]]> 303 Neal Stephenson 0062334492 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.70 2024
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 216857785
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.]]> 352 Malcolm Gladwell 0316575801 Your Excellency 3 read-2024 4.03 2024
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 36040558 The debut literary thriller that launched the career of the bestselling author of BEFORE THE FALL and the creator of the show Fargo.
Linus Owen is a young professor of conspiracy theory at a small college just outside San Francisco. His marriage is foundering and his wife, Claudia, has gone to Chicago to visit her mother. But if Claudia is in Chicago, how is it that two FBI agents show up at Linus' office and inform him that Claudia has been killed in a plane crash on her way from New York to Brazil? And why did a man named Jeffrey Holden, the vice president of a major pharmaceutical company, buy her ticket and die beside her?

Enlisting the aid of two fellow conspiracy theorists, Linus heads across the country in search of answers. But as their journey progresses, it becomes frighteningly clear they've left the realm of the academic and are tangled up in a dangerous, multilayered cover-up. Finally, deep in the heart of the American desert, stunned by an ominous revelation, Linus sees he has a new mission: to try to stay alive.

Part Don DeLillo, part Kurt Vonnegut, with writing that is electric, whip-smart and suspenseful at each turn, Noah Hawley draws us into a deliciously labyrinthine world of paranoia and plots.
"Energetic and funny...an engrossing debut."--The New York Times

]]> 372 Noah Hawley 1538746506 Your Excellency 3 3.00 1998
author: Noah Hawley
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 25898723
Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David. Even though his impoverished family shuns him for being an artist, he is desperate to support them. Living at the foot of his misshapen block of marble, Michelangelo struggles until the stone finally begins to speak. Working against an impossible deadline, he begins his feverish carving.

Meanwhile, Leonardo’s life is falling apart: he loses the hoped-for David commission; he can’t seem to finish any project; he is obsessed with his ungainly flying machine; he almost dies in war; his engineering designs disastrously fail; and he is haunted by a woman he has seen in the market—a merchant’s wife, whom he is finally commissioned to paint. Her name is Lisa, and she becomes his muse.

Leonardo despises Michelangelo for his youth and lack of sophistication. Michelangelo both loathes and worships Leonardo’s genius.

Oil and Marble is the story of their nearly forgotten rivalry. Storey brings early 16th-century Florence alive, and has entered with extraordinary empathy into the minds and souls of two Renaissance masters. The book is an art history thriller.
]]> 362 Stephanie Storey 1628726393 Your Excellency 0 3.95 2016
author: Stephanie Storey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, abandoned
review:

]]> 11325011 Ěý
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents� sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.]]> 289 Ben Marcus 030737937X Your Excellency 5 I found myself thinking hard about what my own children say to us and how it affects us. And yet, is it really the spoutings of adolescents that cause us to atrophy and shrivel?
Marcus says that it is comprehension that undoes us - not just the onslaught of words. I don't know. I wish I understood the book more and could hear others' interpretations. Many of the symbols and events in the book are supposed to be Jewish arcania, which I don't know anything about. And why Jewish? It seems to me there's more of a universal truth than that.
All my discomfort aside, I'm giving this one a 5 because it certainly was amazing. It's going to need a 2nd reading to increase my understanding, but I do know that Marcus is insightful and provocative, and worth reading.


April, 2018:
Well, this was just as good the second time around - and just as indecipherable. I've read other reviews of The Flame Alphabet, and they run the gamut from disgusted to over-intellectual to blazing praise. I'd put myself in the last category, if I knew better why!

Strongly recommended, and worthy of extensive discussion.]]> 2.88 2012
author: Ben Marcus
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: read-2012, kindle-books-to-read, read-2018, read-more-than-once, read-2024
review:
What a disturbing and thought-provoking book! You get the feeling that Mr. Marcus is telling the truth without saying the words - which is incredibly ironic given the story premise...
I found myself thinking hard about what my own children say to us and how it affects us. And yet, is it really the spoutings of adolescents that cause us to atrophy and shrivel?
Marcus says that it is comprehension that undoes us - not just the onslaught of words. I don't know. I wish I understood the book more and could hear others' interpretations. Many of the symbols and events in the book are supposed to be Jewish arcania, which I don't know anything about. And why Jewish? It seems to me there's more of a universal truth than that.
All my discomfort aside, I'm giving this one a 5 because it certainly was amazing. It's going to need a 2nd reading to increase my understanding, but I do know that Marcus is insightful and provocative, and worth reading.


April, 2018:
Well, this was just as good the second time around - and just as indecipherable. I've read other reviews of The Flame Alphabet, and they run the gamut from disgusted to over-intellectual to blazing praise. I'd put myself in the last category, if I knew better why!

Strongly recommended, and worthy of extensive discussion.
]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Your Excellency 3 read-2024 4.16 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 65910910 262 Riccardo Bacchelli 162164572X Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.00 1948
author: Riccardo Bacchelli
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 158227876
Worse than the torment of walking until his feet bleed, is the terrible secret Patrick harbours from his own days as a slave master. It leads Patrick to find God in the desolate Irish hills. Repentance and prayer help to heal his broken spirit, but just as Patrick finally accepts that his permanent future is in Ireland, he is stunned by something that compels him to return to Britain. He becomes a runaway slave, attempting the impossible journey.

Travelling in the dark hours, Patrick secures passage on a merchant vessel and escapes the shores of Ireland. But the boat is bound for Gaul and Patrick is snared in an ordeal worse than his original captivity…]]> 0 Eric Foster 1803134402 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 5.00
author: Eric Foster
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 39977359 The Building, the first book of the Furnass Towers Trilogy, is the story of the well-intentioned but ill-conceived attempt to construct a high-rise building in the middle of a stricken mill town. It is the story of a head-strong superintendent who pours concrete when he's told not to . . . of a rebar foreman whose insecurities make him dangerous to everyone around him . . . the story of an architect who hides the project's true cost so he can build a monument to himself . . . a young inspector totally out of his depth . . . a local developer content to wait and pick up the pieces when the dust settles . . . and it is the story of a young woman across the alley who dances each morning in her window as she takes her shower, who distracts one worker to the point of a fatal accident and provides sanctuary for another.]]> 391 Richard Snodgrass 0999724916 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 4.67
author: Richard Snodgrass
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 13426005 Ideas and The German Genius offers agroundbreaking new understandingof human history.

Why did Asia and Europe develop far earlier than the Americas? What were thefactors that accelerated—or impeded—development? How did the experiences of OldWorld inhabitants differ from their New Worldcounterparts—and what factors influenced thosedifferences?

In this fascinating and erudite history, PeterWatson ponders these questions central to thehuman story. By 15,000 BC, humans had migratedfrom northeastern Asia across the frozen Beringland bridge to the Americas. When the world warmed up and the last Ice Age came to an end,the Bering Strait refilled with water, dividing America from Eurasia. This division—with two great populations on Earth, each unaware of theater—continued until Christopher Columbus voyaged to the New World in the fifteenth century.

The Great Divide compares the development of human kind in the Old World and the New between 15,000 BC and AD 1500. Watson identifies three major differences between the two worlds—climate, domesticable mammals, and hallucinogenic plants—that combined to produce very different trajectories of civilization in the two hemispheres. Combining the most up-to-date knowledge in archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology, and mythology, this unprecedented, masterful study offers uniquely revealing insight into what it means to be human.]]> 640 Peter Watson 0297845586 Your Excellency 0 4.04 2012
author: Peter Watson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 22635841
In the Madre de Dios--Mother of God--region of Peru, where the Amazon River begins its massive flow, the Andean Mountain cloud forests fall into lowland Amazon Rainforest, creating the most biodiversity-rich place on the planet. In January 2006, when he was just a restless eighteen-year-old hungry for adventure, Paul Rosolie embarked on a journey to the west Amazon that would transform his life.

Venturing alone into some of the most inaccessible reaches of the jungle, he encountered giant snakes, floating forests, isolated tribes untouched by outsiders, prowling jaguars, orphaned baby anteaters, poachers in the black market trade in endangered species, and much more. Yet today, the primordial forests of the Madre de Dios are in danger from developers, oil giants, and gold miners eager to exploit its natural resources.

In Mother of God, this explorer and conservationist relives his amazing odyssey exploring the heart of this wildest place on earth. When he began delving deeper in his search for the secret Eden, spending extended periods in isolated solitude, he found things he never imagined could exist. "Alone and miniscule against a titanic landscape I have seen the depths of the Amazon, the guts of the jungle where no men go, Rosolie writes. "But as the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett warned, 'the few remaining unknown places of the world exact a price for their secrets.'"

Illustrated with 16 pages of color photos.]]> 320 Paul Rosolie 0062259520 Your Excellency 5 4.37 2014
author: Paul Rosolie
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: available-on-hoopla-ebook, read-2024
review:

]]> 202167720
It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers in Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.

Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city that are as everlasting as their glass.]]> 416 Tracy Chevalier 0525558276 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.86 2024
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 25014
Simon Winchester tells the fascinating story of 'Strata' Smith, a man who crossed boundaries of class, wealth and science to produce a map that fundamentally changed the way we view the world.]]> 329 Simon Winchester 0060931809 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.83 2001
author: Simon Winchester
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 1587329 316 Somon WINCHESTER 0138700982 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.59 1985
author: Somon WINCHESTER
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 75500179 Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash ("One of the great American authors at work today" --The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.

It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Lampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob's wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clare is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town's most elegant hotel. When Naomi elopes with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalizes the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherit him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.]]> 252 Ron Rash 0385544278 Your Excellency 4 read-2024 4.11 2023
author: Ron Rash
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

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

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

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 3.68 2025
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 Your Excellency 0 4.20 2021
author: David Graeber
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-audiobook
review:

]]> 28867 778 Edward Rutherfurd 0345472357 Your Excellency 2 read-2024 3.86 2004
author: Edward Rutherfurd
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 34727559 Readers say it "Very informative." "Saved me a lot of money and headaches!" "Recommend it for everyone who has to plan estates for their elderly parents"Living Trusts for Everyone is the best resource for setting up a living trust. Explaining in specific terms what benefits a trust will have, Ronald Farrington Sharp gives the tools necessary to set up a loved one’s trust with no lawyers and no expense.Wills benefit lawyers. Trusts benefit the clients. Too often lawyers sell wills to clients only to sit back and wait to sell their probate services to their clients� heirs. Ronald Farrington Sharp describes the best way to handle modern estate planning and details the many advantages trusts have over wills in not only eliminating probate but in also protecting your assets for your heirs. Sharp explains why legal services are not needed to do the clerical work in settling a trust after death. This updated edition includes new information on an array of subjects, of the federal estate tax for most estates due to increased exemption amountsOnline assetsThe use of passwords, usernames, and websitesKeeping trustees honest and the process of removing trustees for malfeasanceForms for simplifying the planning processStrategies to lower attorneys� feesWith no legal jargon, just step-by-step instructions and sample form letters, Living Trusts for Everyone takes the mystery out of the process of setting up a trust.]]> 189 Ronald Farrington Sharp Your Excellency 0 4.27 2010
author: Ronald Farrington Sharp
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: nook-books-to-read, owned, on-hold
review:

]]> 23015
Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern’s cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. As her ex-husband lies dying and the outbreak of computerized war fills her with a sense of guilty complicity, Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, were she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong.

On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. Without distraction or hope of release, he must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion. Plowing the Dark is fiction that explores the imagination’s power to both destroy and save.]]> 415 Richard Powers 0099286726 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.68 2000
author: Richard Powers
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 1216690 367 Jack Larkin 0060916060 Your Excellency 0 4.06 1988
author: Jack Larkin
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 3307416 Five Cities that Ruled the World, theologian Douglas Wilson fuses together, in compelling detail, the critical moments birthed in history's most influential cities --Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and New York.

Wilson issues a challenge to our collective understanding of history with the juxtapositions of freedom and its intrinsic failures; liberty and its deep-seated liabilities. Each revelation beckoning us deeper into a city's story, its political systems, and how it flourished and floundered.

You'll discover the significance of:

Jerusalem's complex history and its deep-rooted character as the city of freedom, where people found their spiritual liberty.
Athens' intellectual influence as the city of reason and birthplace of democracy.
Rome's evolution as the city of law and justice and the freedoms and limitations that come with liberty.
London's place in the world's history as the city of literature where man's literary imagination found its wings.
New York's rise to global fame as the city of commerce and how it triggered unmatched wealth, industry, and trade throughout the world.

Five Cities that Ruled the World chronicles the destruction, redemption, personalities, and power structures that altered the world's political, spiritual, and moral center time and again. It's an inspiring, enlightening global perspective that encourages readers to honor our shared history, contribute to the present, and look to the future with unmistakable hope.]]> 256 Douglas Wilson 1595551360 Your Excellency 0 3.58 2008
author: Douglas Wilson
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: maybe-to-read, available-on-hoopla-audiobook, available-on-hoopla-ebook
review:

]]> 1736739
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life � sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.]]> 270 Elizabeth Strout Your Excellency 0 abandoned 3.85 2008
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 7785228 256 David Murrow 0785227628 Your Excellency 5 3.66 2010
author: David Murrow
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 23000 352 Richard Powers 006097611X Your Excellency 4 read-2024 3.58 1993
author: Richard Powers
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 8166704 224 Margaret Muir 070909051X Your Excellency 0 4.04 2010
author: Margaret Muir
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: maybe-to-read, kindle-books-to-read
review:

]]> 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]> 387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X Your Excellency 2 read-2024 3.74 2024
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 6561294
Then, late one night, an intruder is sighted on the hospital grounds, the first in a series of uncanny events that appear to the doctor to be strangely linked; clues abound, yet the truth about Bertram seems always to slip away. Meanwhile, Dr. Harrison's own long-buried troubles reemerge with brutal force. As the careful contours of his existence begin to waver, the doctor is plunged into dangerous, compulsive territory.

When Dr. Harrison finds himself spying on his head nurse, Matilda, even following her one midnight through the underground tunnels that join the hospital buildings, he knows there is no turning back. He is desperate to get to the bottom of the intertwining mysteries connecting Bertram, Matilda, and himself, and senses that everything in his life -- and theirs -- is at stake.

Set against the backdrop of the insanity of war, The Listener explores the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche, and illuminates the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity. Shira Nayman's storytelling is mesmerizing. The Listener is a riveting tale of madness, mystery, and passion that excavates the dark corners of the human heart and mind. It is a work of rare depth and power.]]> 320 Shira Nayman 0743292820 Your Excellency 0 maybe-to-read 2.79 2009
author: Shira Nayman
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 2.79
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: maybe-to-read
review:

]]> 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Your Excellency 2 read-2024 3.55 2023
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 181346411
Our use of language naturally evolves and is a living, breathing thing that reflects who we are. Says Who? offers clear, nuanced guidance that goes beyond “right� and “wrong� to empower us to make informed language choices. Never snooty or scoldy (yes, that’s a “real� word!), this book explains where the grammar rules we learned in school actually come from and reveals the forces that drive dictionary editors to label certain words as slang or unacceptable.

Linguist and veteran English professor Anne Curzan equips readers with the tools they need to adeptly manage (a split infinitive?! You betcha!) formal and informal writing and speaking. After all, we don’t want to be caught wearing our linguistic pajamas to a job interview any more than we want to show up for a backyard barbecue in a verbal tux, asking, “To whom shall I pass the ketchup?� Curzan helps us use our new knowledge about the developing nature of language and grammar rules to become caretakers of language rather than gatekeepers of it. Applying entertaining examples from literature, newspapers, television, and more, Curzan welcomes usage novices and encourages the language police to lower their pens, showing us how we can care about language precision, clarity, and inclusion all at the same time.

With lively humor and humanity, Says Who? is a pragmatic and accessible key that reveals how our choices about language usage can be a powerful force for equity and personal expression. For proud grammar sticklers and self-conscious writers alike, Curzan makes nerding out about language fun.]]> 336 Anne Curzan 0593444094 Your Excellency 0 abandoned 4.09 2024
author: Anne Curzan
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 291418 256 David Murrow 0785260382 Your Excellency 5 3.83 2005
author: David Murrow
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: kindle-books-have-read, owned, read-2024, to-read-again
review:

]]> 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 Your Excellency 1 read-2024 4.02 2023
author: Henry Hoke
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/11
shelves: read-2024
review:

]]> 39027388 Virgil Wander is an all-American story that follows the inhabitants of a small Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart.

Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking, kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man; to Tom, a journalist and Virgil's oldest friend; and various members of the Pea family who must confront tragedies of their own. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town.]]> 303 Leif Enger 0802128785 Your Excellency 5 read-2024, to-read-again 3.97 2018
author: Leif Enger
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: read-2024, to-read-again
review:

]]> 1659305 800 David J. Garrow 0688166326 Your Excellency 0 4.33 1986
author: David J. Garrow
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: kindle-books-and-want-to-read, owned, abandoned
review:

]]> 615629 338 Jon Winokur 0452270308 Your Excellency 4 3.92 1995
author: Jon Winokur
name: Your Excellency
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:

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