en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 00:11:49 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 1000358
Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacable revenge, she naturally turns to her brazen friend Baba for help.

But Baba, the bored trophy wife of builder Frank, vulgarly flashing his wealth and ignorance to the world, has her own problems without Kate drooping self-pityingly over her. And both women find unsuspected qualities in themselves as they learn to face reality.]]> 160 Edna O'Brien 0452284384 Anne 0 to-read 3.54 1964
author: Edna O'Brien
name: Anne
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1294332 212 Edna O'Brien 0140021086 Anne 0 to-read 3.72 1962
author: Edna O'Brien
name: Anne
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 517061 175 Edna O'Brien 0452283434 Anne 0 currently-reading 3.75 1960
author: Edna O'Brien
name: Anne
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 197828937
"A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers." �� George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind."—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 333 Miranda July 0593190289 Anne 3 3.47 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Anne
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
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]]> 40389527
Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother and their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.]]> 455 A.J. Finn Anne 3 3.94 2018
author: A.J. Finn
name: Anne
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> 54539 262 George Eliot Anne 5 3.67 1861
author: George Eliot
name: Anne
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1861
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
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]]> 25470328
Published in 1886 initially as a weekly serial in the Graphic, The Mayor of Casterbridge was Hardy's tenth novel. The plot is distinct from what came before it, concerning the fortunes of a single man, Michael Henchard who, while young and in a drunken stupor, sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. By the time he is sober enough to regret the decision it is too late. In the years to come his fortunes rise, but so does his guilt and when, conversely, his wife returns, his guilt is assuaged but his fortunes fall.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is rightly counted as one of Hardy's principal works just as it is a novel that stands firmly in the literary canon. Though it might be said to be a moral tale as much as a tragedy, it is more so a study of a single character, tracing his private hidden faults set against his public persona and how those faults come to bend his character and alter his life. The strength of Henchard's character and the pain his past mistakes bring to him have made some bring justifiable similarities to Shakespeare and served to taske Hardy's work well beyond the pastoral humour of his early work.]]> 322 Thomas Hardy Anne 4 currently-reading 4.36 1886
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Anne
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1886
rating: 4
read at: 2015/06/06
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 37640629


Because there is a RIGHT way to tell a story, one built into our very DNA.



In his seminal work Poetics, Aristotle identified the patterns and recurring elements that existed in the successful dramas of his time as he explored precisely why we tell stories, what makes a good one, and how to best tell them.



In Classical Storytelling and Contemporary Screenwriting, Brian Price examines Aristotle’s conclusions in an entertaining and accessible way and then applies those guiding principles to the most modern of storytelling mediums, going from idea to story to structure to outline to final pages and beyond, covering every relevant screenwriting topic along the way.



The result is a fresh new approach to the craft of screenwriting—one that’s only been around a scant 2,500 years or so—ideal for students and aspiring screenwriters��who want a comprehensive step-by-step guide to writing a successful screenplay the way the pros do it.]]> 258 Brian Price Anne 5 5.00
author: Brian Price
name: Anne
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
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]]> 52761023 Washington Black; My Sister, The Serial Killer; and Her Body and Other Parties.

As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.]]> 384 Susan Abulhawa 1982137037 Anne 0 4.52 2019
author: Susan Abulhawa
name: Anne
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read, arab-and-israeli-literature
review:

]]> 223604346 From the noted business and foundation leader, a bold new argument for harnessing brain science to make sure all children thrive



At nine, a boy named Sixto Cancel was adopted by a woman who kept a lock on her refrigerator and was verbally abusive.��Meanwhile, extended and loving family members lived just an hour away—and would have taken him in if a public system had made an effort to find them. Sixto moved in and out of broken households for years, one of the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who lack the relationships essential to succeeding in adulthood.



A major new book for parents and policymakers alike,��Thrive��argues that how we understand the unequal experiences of adolescence holds the key to ensuring that all children have an equal chance of becoming successful adults. Drawing on her deep engagement with public systems and youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, author Lisa M. Lawson condenses a broad range of brain science, exploring the personal and institutional structures every child needs, as well as the shocking gaps in our systems for disadvantaged children.



Arguing that we all have a shared stake in helping young people navigate the road to��adulthood, Lawson lays out the ways that families, government, nonprofits, and business can draw lessons from science—and take steps to help all young people thrive.]]> 240 Lisa M. Lawson 1620979691 Anne 0 to-read 0.0
author: Lisa M. Lawson
name: Anne
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
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]]> 199896995
Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis�� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 300 Colm Tóibín 1476785139 Anne 5 3.77 2024
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Anne
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> 9271896
Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father, a con artist who works wonders of deception but is a most unreliable parent. Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke and mirrors where the only unshifting truth is his father’s and his beloved twin sister’s deep and abiding love for the works of William Shakespeare—a love so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid for their approval and affection.

Years later, Arthur’s father, imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, shares with Arthur a treasure he’s kept secret for half a a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, titled The Tragedy of Arthur . But Arthur and his sister also inherit their father’s to see the play published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity. . . .

Unless it’s their father’s last great con.

By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel—which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost King Arthur play in its five-act entirety—captures the very essence of romantic and familial love and betrayal. The Tragedy of Arthur explores the tension between storytelling and truth-telling, the thirst for originality in all our lives, and the act of literary mythmaking, both now and four centuries ago, as the two Arthurs—Arthur the novelist and Arthur the ancient king—play out their individual but strangely intertwined fates.

A�� New York Times ��Notable Book �� A�� New Yorker ��Reviewers�� Favorite of the Year �� A Wall Street Journal Best Novel of the Year �� A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year �� A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year �� ��A�� Library Journal ��Top Ten Book of the Year �� A�� Kirkus Reviews ��Best Book of the Year �� One of Salon’s��five best novels of the year]]> 368 Arthur Phillips 1400066476 Anne 0 to-read 3.46 2011
author: Arthur Phillips
name: Anne
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 Anne 4 3.82 1884
author: Mark Twain
name: Anne
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Anne 4 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Anne
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 19847968
The 50th-anniversary edition of the bestselling novel that launched John le Carré’s career worldwide

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.

Setting a standard that has never been surpassed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a devastating tale of duplicity and espionage.]]> 213 John Le Carré Anne 4 4.26 1963
author: John Le Carré
name: Anne
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 10235 Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity"—a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners in Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains": as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.]]> 333 Tracy Kidder 0812973011 Anne 5 4.19 2003
author: Tracy Kidder
name: Anne
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 203019740 From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that spans decades.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Mohammed Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy with one eye, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope.]]> 608 Chris Whitaker 0593798872 Anne 0 to-read 4.23 2024
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Anne
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207293782 Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?�� —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock n�� rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.]]> 352 Lili Anolik 1668065487 Anne 0 to-read 3.21 2024
author: Lili Anolik
name: Anne
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38532113
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.]]> 288 Lili Anolik 1501125796 Anne 0 to-read 3.58 2019
author: Lili Anolik
name: Anne
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19194410 The Definitive Edition of TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
-Illustrated with original illustrations from its first publication
-Complete, unabridged, and formatted for kindle to improve your reading experience
-Linked table of contents to reach your chapter quickly

“One of the 1000 novels everyone must read�� The Guardian

“Whatever happens to her, however cruel her destiny, she has a clear sense of herself, and the strength to remain true to it.�� Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

“A tragic tale of love, seduction and betrayal, Tess of the D’Urbervilles was named the nation’s 12th favourite book in a poll for World Book Day in 2007.�� BBC

“Hardy is masterful at weaving an intricate plot. Tess is a resplendent character; she jumps from the pages of the book and emerges as a life force before our very eyes.�� Bonnie

“Tess herself, who I fell in love with almost straight away and empathised with throughout; the painfully realistic depiction of emotions and reactions; the glorious, romantic descriptions of the landscapes the characters inhabited.�� Blair

TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES is one of the most haunting and beautiful novels of all time. It has been made into many film and television adaptations. This is Hardy’s masterpiece presented as it was meant to be read, with original illustrations from its first appearance.
]]> 263 Thomas Hardy Anne 5 4.09 1891
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Anne
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1891
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
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]]> 57408095 Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation -- a powerful, emotionally rich novel about love, friendship, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers".

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaulate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.

In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller, Super Sad True Love Story.]]> 317 Gary Shteyngart 1984855123 Anne 0 to-read 3.15 2021
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Anne
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58783802 A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.]]> 367 Kelly Barnhill 0385548222 Anne 3 3.79 2022
author: Kelly Barnhill
name: Anne
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Anne 4 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Anne
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> 59366244
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,�� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?�� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died , Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!��), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 304 Jennette McCurdy 1982185821 Anne 4 4.42 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Anne
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> 42201447
“An extraordinary book, I can’t recommend it highly enough.�� –Whoopi Goldberg, The View

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call —the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors�� in the 1920s.

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws�� had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.]]> 496 Daniel Okrent 1476798036 Anne 0 to-read 4.02 2019
author: Daniel Okrent
name: Anne
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217223453 Highly acclaimed��New York Times��bestseller Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery…that only she can solve.��

Mrs. Blossom is not the kind of woman to play the lottery. She is practical, a devoted grandmother, and has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan. But when Mrs. Blossom finds a winning ticket in a parking lot, everything changes...including Mrs. Blossom. She is determined to see the world that sometimes feels as if it’s passing her by.

But when Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS Solitaire, she did not expect to meet Allan on her transatlantic flight. He is the first man who’s sparked something inside her since her beloved husband passed.

She also didn’t expect Allan to be found, dead, twenty-four hours later in Paris, a city he wasn’t supposed to be in.

Now Mrs. Blossom doesn’t know who to trust on board the ship, especially when a new, mystifying man, Danny, keeps popping up around every corner, always present when things go awry. He claims that Allan was involved in the transport of a stolen, precious piece of art, and he’s convinced that Mrs. Blossom knows more than she lets on, regarding both the artifact and Allan’s murder.

Mrs. Blossom’s questions only increase as the cruise sails down the Seine. Why does it feel like she is being followed? Who was Allan, and why was he killed? Most alarmingly, why do these mysterious men keep flirting with her?

What follows is a charming one-of-a-kind mystery from one of��Time magazine’s “essential crime writers of the last 100 years.�� The perfect combination of cozy and thrilling, this novel and the delightful Mrs. Blossom are sure to be unforgettable.]]> 272 Laura Lippman 0062998102 Anne 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Laura Lippman
name: Anne
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Anne 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Anne
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 34845512
“Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year)
“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff
“Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

One of the Best Books of the Year—BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly]]> 185 Han Kang Anne 4 3.57 2007
author: Han Kang
name: Anne
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 18752548 57 Aristotle 0486110710 Anne 5 4.16 -335
author: Aristotle
name: Anne
average rating: 4.16
book published: -335
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Anne 4 3.77 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Anne
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> 201102290
With Hannah and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.]]> 272 Dinaw Mengestu 0385350007 Anne 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Dinaw Mengestu
name: Anne
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 190118193 From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?]]> 610 Rachel Khong 0593537262 Anne 4 4.15 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Anne
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Anne 0 to-read 4.37 2021
author: John Green
name: Anne
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 125060794 Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux.

«J’écrirai por venger ma race»

It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022.

To write of her own life, she asserts, is to “shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed;�� to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

Includes Annie Ernaux's Nobel lecture, her Nobel banquet speech, a congratulatory speech by Professor��Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, and the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.]]> 26 Annie Ernaux 1644213621 Anne 0 to-read 4.17
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Anne
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 60843483 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.�� She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
��
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1644212196 Anne 0 to-read 3.47 2001
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Anne
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 58678702 67 Annie Ernaux 1644213575 Anne 0 to-read 3.98 1991
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Anne
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 399262 This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1583222561 Anne 4 4.32 2000
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Anne
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 11751 All Aunt Hagar's Children. Here he turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them in the city, people who in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally complex. With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw behind them and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.]]> 399 Edward P. Jones 0060557567 Anne 5 3.81 2006
author: Edward P. Jones
name: Anne
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 67 The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones.

The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.]]> 388 Edward P. Jones 0061159174 Anne 5 I strongly suggest finding interviews with Edward P. Jones about this novel, and go right to them after you finish reading or listening to the novel. As usual, I switch back and forth from text to audio, and the audio version is excellent. At the end, there is an audio interview with the author. ]]> 3.83 2003
author: Edward P. Jones
name: Anne
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:
I have wanted to read this for years, ever since a friend told me it was her favorite novel. It is a masterpiece. I loved “All Aunt Hagar’s Children�� just as much, and now I would like to read “Lost in the City�� next.
I strongly suggest finding interviews with Edward P. Jones about this novel, and go right to them after you finish reading or listening to the novel. As usual, I switch back and forth from text to audio, and the audio version is excellent. At the end, there is an audio interview with the author.
]]> 210331628 A suspenseful, satirical dark comedy about a struggling writer who wakes up to find his date from the night before dead—and must then decide how far he’s willing to go to spin the misadventure into his next big book.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

The issue is, good ideas are hard to come by, and the mounting pressure of a near-empty bank account isn’t helping. But when David connects with a sexy stranger on a dating app, he figures a wild night out in New York City may be just what he needs to find inspiration. Lucky for him, his date turns out to be handsome, confident, and wealthy, not to mention the perfect distraction from yet another evening staring at a blank screen.

After one of the best nights of his life, David wakes up hungover but giddy—only to find prince charming dead next to him in bed. Horrified, completely confused, and suddenly faced with the implausible-but-somehow-plausible idea that he may have actually killed his date, David calls the only person he can trust in a moment of crisis: his literary agent, Stacey.

Together, David and Stacey must untangle the events of the previous night, cover their tracks, and spin the entire misadventure into David’s career-defining novel—if only they can figure out what to do with the body first.]]> 329 Daniel Aleman 1538766345 Anne 0 to-read 3.60 2024
author: Daniel Aleman
name: Anne
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 219449299 A brand new series. An iconic new detective duo. And a puzzling new murder to solve...

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?]]> 387 Richard Osman 059365322X Anne 0 to-read 4.06 2024
author: Richard Osman
name: Anne
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> 195430688
Stella reached for an oyster, tipped her head and tossed it back. It was cool and slippery, the flavor so briny it was like diving into the ocean... Oysters, she thought, where have they been all my life?

When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual a one-way plane ticket and a note reading Go to Paris . But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a childhood trauma has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone. When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.

Alone in a foreign city, Stella falls into old habits, living cautiously and frugally. Then she stumbles across a vintage store where she tries on a fabulous Dior dress. The shopkeeper insists that this dress was meant for Stella and, for the first time in her life, Stella does something impulsive. She buys the dress and together they embark on an adventure.

Her first iconic brasserie Les Deux Magots, where Stella tastes her first oysters, and then meets an octogenarian art collector who decides to take her under his wing. As Jules introduces her to a veritable who’s who of the 1980s Paris literary, art, and culinary worlds, Stella begins to understand what it might mean to live a larger life.

As weeks—and many decadent meals—go by, Stella ends up living as a “tumbleweed�� at famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company, uncovers a hundred-year-old mystery in a Manet painting, and discovers a passion for food that may be connected to her past. A feast for the senses, this novel is a testament to living deliciously, taking chances, and finding your true home.]]> 288 Ruth Reichl 0812996305 Anne 0 to-read 3.67 2024
author: Ruth Reichl
name: Anne
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Anne 5 3.85 2008
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Anne
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> 205066300 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?��

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,�� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 327 Elizabeth Strout 0593446100 Anne 4 4.24 2024
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Anne
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> 57062743 A deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays from #1 bestselling author John Green, adapted from his critically acclaimed podcast.


The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet--from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu--on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as "observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy." John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

Narrated by the author.]]> 10 John Green 0593408535 Anne 0 to-read 4.42 2021
author: John Green
name: Anne
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43269446 This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

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

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead 0345804341 Anne 0 to-read 4.34 2019
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Anne
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 31931735
In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there—and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash��includes contributions from several of today’s most esteemed storytellers including: Colum McCann, Jacqueline Woodson, Colm Toibin, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Raja Shehadeh, Mario Vargas Llosa and Assaf Gavron, as well as from editors Chabon and Waldman. Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers��will gain��unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news,��as well as��deeper understanding of the conflict as��experienced by��the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.

��]]> 448 Michael Chabon 006243179X Anne 5 arab-and-israeli-literature
The essays are by some of my favorite American, Australian and Irish authors, along with many more I have newly discovered. Writers from Palestine, Israel, Netherlands, Holland, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and other countries.

They witnessed life in the West Bank and Gaza, and in settlements and Jerusalem. And they reported what they witnessed. We should all read it. ]]> 4.28 2017
author: Michael Chabon
name: Anne
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: arab-and-israeli-literature
review:
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It is a series of human chronicles of everyday life that flesh out our understanding of Israel and Palestine beyond what headlines and news stories tell us about the numbers dead, the failed attempts at diplomacy and continued tension and violence. These are the stories of people and communities.

The essays are by some of my favorite American, Australian and Irish authors, along with many more I have newly discovered. Writers from Palestine, Israel, Netherlands, Holland, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and other countries.

They witnessed life in the West Bank and Gaza, and in settlements and Jerusalem. And they reported what they witnessed. We should all read it.
]]> 203164357 The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognize �� a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick - except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the ‘sidekick�� is DC Reggie Chase.

The crumbling house - Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton - suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it.

Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another The Woman with a Weasel, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow’s carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does The Woman with a Weasel hold? The puzzle is Jackson’s to solve. And let’s not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace.

All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house.

A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers.]]> 320 Kate Atkinson 0385547994 Anne 4
I see at least one reader was put off by the number of characters. I did notice there are a lot, but even the minor ones (mostly, the actors putting on the murder-mystery weekend) have some agency and purpose. Don’t get bogged down about keeping track of all the actor characters.

The main characters are wonderfully fleshed out, as always in any Kate Atkinson novel. That is her strength, along with humor, and this novel will not disappoint in those two areas.
]]> 3.69 2024
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Anne
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
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While this novel features Jackson Brodie, he has slightly less prominence than in the others, which means you need not have read the others to fully enjoy this homage to the classic British mystery novel. But the best thing is that Det. Reggie Chase is also back. She is one of my favorite Atkinson characters, and I hope she will return in every Brodie book, and maybe be the lead character in the next one. I feel like I’ve know her since she was a 16-year-old orphaned babysitter hero.

I see at least one reader was put off by the number of characters. I did notice there are a lot, but even the minor ones (mostly, the actors putting on the murder-mystery weekend) have some agency and purpose. Don’t get bogged down about keeping track of all the actor characters.

The main characters are wonderfully fleshed out, as always in any Kate Atkinson novel. That is her strength, along with humor, and this novel will not disappoint in those two areas.

]]> 199124697 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 236 Catherine Newman 0063345188 Anne 2 3.76 2024
author: Catherine Newman
name: Anne
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
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]]> 10595532 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 336 E.L. Doctorow Anne 5 4.16 1975
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Anne
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/21
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]]> 18956 From the creator of HBO's The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television show.

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year's most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition—which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs—revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.]]> 646 David Simon 0805080759 Anne 4 4.34 1991
author: David Simon
name: Anne
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> 23168817 512 Liu Cixin Anne 0 to-read 4.39 2008
author: Liu Cixin
name: Anne
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56534999 Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses.

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

When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?]]> 334 Mick Herron 1641292970 Anne 3 4.05 2010
author: Mick Herron
name: Anne
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 60279775 An orphan grapples with gender, siblinghood, family, and coming-of-age as a Muslim in America in this lyrical debut novel from the acclaimed author of If They Come For Us

In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her crybaby younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.

As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency she's known or carve out a new path for herself. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who've lost everything might still make homes in each other.]]> 352 Fatimah Asghar 0593133463 Anne 0 to-read 3.92 2022
author: Fatimah Asghar
name: Anne
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36477795
In this powerful and imaginative debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar nakedly captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in America by braiding together personal and marginalized people's histories. After being orphaned as a young girl, Asghar grapples with coming-of-age as a woman without the guidance of a mother, questions of sexuality and race, and navigating a world that put a target on her back. Asghar's poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests in our relationships with friends and family, and in our own understanding of identity. Using experimental forms and a mix of lyrical and brash language, Asghar confronts her own understanding of identity and place and belonging.]]> 106 Fatimah Asghar 052550978X Anne 0 to-read 4.24 2018
author: Fatimah Asghar
name: Anne
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48583586 85 M. Shawn Copeland Anne 3 3.00 2007
author: M. Shawn Copeland
name: Anne
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2020/12/01
date added: 2024/11/12
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]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk�� city of “old traditions and new machinery,�� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning�� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Anne 0 to-read 4.51 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Anne
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55457493
Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life.

As bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. And if they find the diamonds too? Well, wouldn't that be a bonus?

But this time they are up against an enemy who wouldn't bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians. Can The Thursday Murder Club find the killer (and the diamonds) before the killer finds them?]]> 422 Richard Osman Anne 4 4.36 2021
author: Richard Osman
name: Anne
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
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]]> 60845564 A mystery featuring hard-boiled Chicago detective Harriet Foster, who’s on the hunt for a serial killer with a deadly affinity for redheads.

When a young red-haired woman is found brutally murdered in downtown Chicago, one detail stands out: the red lipstick encircling her wrists and ankles.

Detective Harriet Foster is on the case, even though she’s still grieving the sudden death of her partner. As a Black woman in a male-dominated department, Foster anticipates a rocky road ahead acclimating to a new team—and building trust with her new partner isn’t coming easily.

After another victim turns up with the same lipstick markings, Foster suspects she’s looking for a serial killer. Through a tip from a psychiatrist, Foster learns about Bodie Morgan: a troubled man with a twisted past and a penchant for pretty young redheads with the bluest eyes. As Foster wades into Morgan’s sinister history, the killer continues their gruesome assault on Chicago’s streets.

In her desperate race to catch the murderer before they strike again, Foster will have to confront the darkest of secrets—including her own.]]> 377 Tracy Clark 1542037581 Anne 0 to-read 4.15 2023
author: Tracy Clark
name: Anne
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

A gothic masterpiece of tempestuous passions and dark secrets, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis in Penguin Classics.

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 Anne 0 to-read 4.14 1847
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Anne
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1847
rating: 0
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]]> 7540434
Yet a prominent Indian scientist dies in a fit of giggles when a Hindu goddess appears from a mist and plunges a sword into his chest.

The only one laughing now is the main suspect, a powerful guru named Maharaj Swami, who seems to have done away with his most vocal critic.

Vish Puri, India’s Most Private Investigator, master of disguise and lover of all things fried and spicy, doesn’t believe the murder is a supernatural occurrence, and proving who really killed Dr. Suresh Jha will require all the detective’s earthly faculties. To get at the truth, he and his team of undercover operatives—Facecream, Tubelight, and Flush—travel from the slum where India’s hereditary magicians must be persuaded to reveal their secrets to the holy city of Haridwar on the Ganges.]]> 296 Tarquin Hall 1416583696 Anne 0 to-read 3.77 2009
author: Tarquin Hall
name: Anne
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59364113 A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.]]> 240 Patrick Bringley 1982163321 Anne 0 to-read 4.00 2023
author: Patrick Bringley
name: Anne
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
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]]> 2980383 Hardly Knew Her: Stories 290 Laura Lippman 0061584991 Anne 0 to-read 3.65 2008
author: Laura Lippman
name: Anne
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61484773 Homicide, the celebrated true crime-book from the creator of HBO's The Wire, is reenvisioned in this first volume of a gritty, cinematic graphic novel duology.

In 1988, journalist David Simon was given unprecedented access to the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. Over the next twelve months, he shadowed detectives as they took on a slew of killings in a city where killings were common. Only the most heinous cases stood out–chief amongst them, the rape and murder of eleven-year-old Latonya Wallace.

Originally published in 1991, Simon’s Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show Homicide: Life on the Street and inspired HBO’s The Wire. Now, this true-crime classic is reimagined as a gritty two-part graphic novel series.]]> 318 Philippe Squarzoni 1250624622 Anne 0 to-read 4.07
author: Philippe Squarzoni
name: Anne
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6894125
Here are fine-drawn, empathetic portraits of the often overlooked actors of America’s infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper, an overburdened nuclear engineer, a duty-bound female fighter pilot, a religiously impassioned novice reporter, a sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us, in the course of one shattering year, from a forested city park where child whores set up business to a Dubai hotel where a desperate man tries to disappear, from the nighttime corridors of Walter Reed Hospital to the snow-thickened mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Told in language as stunning for its beauty as for its verisimilitude, The Room and the Chair dazzlingly bends the conventions of literary suspense to create an unforgettable, groundbreaking chronicle of today’s dangerous world.]]> 336 Lorraine Adams 0307272419 Anne 0 to-read 2.69 2010
author: Lorraine Adams
name: Anne
average rating: 2.69
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 619942 Harbor recounts the adventures of Aziz Arkoun who, at twenty-four, makes his way to America via the hold of an Algerian tanker and the icy waters of Boston harbor. Aziz soon finds himself a community of fellow Algerians, but their means of survival in this strange land begins to remind him of the dangerous world he was desperate to escape. As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds, moving from East Boston and Brooklyn to Montreal and a North African army camp, Harbor takes us inside the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives. When Aziz discovers that he and his circle are most likely under surveillance, all assumptions, his and ours, dissolve in urgent, mesmerizing complexity. ��]]> 291 Lorraine Adams 1400076889 Anne 0 to-read 3.32 2004
author: Lorraine Adams
name: Anne
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36129087
Charles Dickens’s belief in renaissance is borne out in this epic novel - as cities are overthrown and transformed, as cynics become selfless heroes, and as a “recall to life�� becomes not only possible but necessary, for the individual and for society.

AmazonClassics brings you timeless works from the masters of storytelling. Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or rediscover an old favorite, these new editions open the door to literature’s most unforgettable characters and beloved worlds.]]> 432 Charles Dickens 154209920X Anne 5 4.27 1859
author: Charles Dickens
name: Anne
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1859
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
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]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.��A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Anne 0 to-read 4.11 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: Anne
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62920766
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.]]> 256 Anne Tyler 0593466403 Anne 4 3.51 2022
author: Anne Tyler
name: Anne
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

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

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

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

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Anne 3 4.17 2022
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Anne
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
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]]> 53231851
McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm--the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country--from parks and pools to functioning schools--have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world's advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to accomplish what we simply can't do on our own.

McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint a story of racism's costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy's collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.]]> 415 Heather McGhee 0525509569 Anne 5 4.62 2021
author: Heather McGhee
name: Anne
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> 470367
The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.]]> 304 Riane Eisler 0062502891 Anne 0 to-read 4.18 1987
author: Riane Eisler
name: Anne
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1770971
The big gamblers who spend millions per film as well as the colorful low-budget kings provide an intriguing look at the mechanics of filmmaking. Choosing and preparing the screenplay, working with actors and crew, dealing with the distributor, and advice to young filmmakers--all are covered in this book's illuminating interviews. Serious students of cinema, filmmakers, movie buffs, and people fascinated by film will find Film Directors on in this book's illuminating interviews.]]> 304 John Andrew Gallagher 0275932729 Anne 0 to-read 3.40 1989
author: John Andrew Gallagher
name: Anne
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 451412 440 Toby Cole 0023233001 Anne 0 to-read 3.89 1963
author: Toby Cole
name: Anne
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 14060541 An American classic and the inspiration for the motion picture starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.

It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.�� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring�� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 288 Patricia Highsmith Anne 4 4.14 1955
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Anne
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
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]]> 62630913 A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who left two older daughters behind to build a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. But Yelena, mindful of the thoroughly American life she craves, puts off all suitors. Through a chain of fateful meetings, she is gradually wooed by the attentive but sickly Viktor Gomelekoff, born in her parents' hometown, who seems to share her yearnings. When she discovers what choosing Viktor has cost her, her life is forever changed. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga in which every person is striving to create their own story within the storied American landscape. The narrative of transformation from immigrant to citizen is as winding, treacherous, and fraught in the time of the novel as it is today.]]> 354 Mary Kay Zuravleff 1958888001 Anne 3 4.18
author: Mary Kay Zuravleff
name: Anne
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> 427281 Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder �� one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith 0393324559 Anne 3 3.64 1957
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Anne
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Anne 4 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Anne
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
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]]> 25380596 I'll Tell Them I Remember You is New York Times bestselling author William Peter Blatty's memoir about being raised by his single Lebanese mother struggling to make ends meet in 1930s Manhattan.In this heartfelt and humorous autobiography, Blatty shares what it was like growing up with a strong-willed and opinionated mother who did anything and everything to keep her five children fed and sheltered no matter how strange or unusual. Her spirit and influence helped shape Blatty as a man, a father, and as the famous author of The Exoricst.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 147 William Peter Blatty Anne 0 4.20 1973
author: William Peter Blatty
name: Anne
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: arab-and-israeli-literature, to-read
review:

]]> 36203362 How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”��Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.]]> 304 Sheila Heti 1627790772 Anne 0 to-read 3.66 2018
author: Sheila Heti
name: Anne
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/21
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]]> 25893693
On the eve of a fateful war, New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939—and then sets its sights on France.

An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she sinks deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement. In a tense atmosphere of watchful eyes and suspect neighbors, one false move can have dire consequences.

For ambitious young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, an ad for a government medical position seems her ticket out of a desolate life. But, once hired, she finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power.

The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious female-only Nazi concentration camp. The tragedy and triumph of their stories cross continents—from New York to Paris, and Germany to Poland—capturing the indomitable pull of compassion to bring justice to those whom history has forgotten.

In Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly has crafted a remarkable novel of unsung women and their quest for love, happiness, and second chances. It is a story that will keep readers bonded with the characters, searching for the truth, until the final pages.]]> 487 Martha Hall Kelly 1101883073 Anne 0 to-read 4.27 2016
author: Martha Hall Kelly
name: Anne
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 13529 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

From the author of the acclaimed Year of Wonders, a historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks gives us the story of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women—and conjures a world of brutality, stubborn courage and transcendent love. An idealistic abolitionist, March has gone as chaplain to serve the Union cause. But the war tests his faith not only in the Union—which is also capable of barbarism and racism—but in himself. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness, March must reassemble and reconnect with his family, who have no idea of what he has endured. A love story set in a time of catastrophe, March explores the passions between a man and a woman, the tenderness of parent and child, and the life-changing power of an ardently held belief.]]> 280 Geraldine Brooks Anne 0 to-read 3.77 2005
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Anne
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 61423989
The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows �� their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman �� Madge Oberholtzer �� who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.]]> 432 Timothy Egan 0735225265 Anne 0 to-read 4.33 2023
author: Timothy Egan
name: Anne
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/21
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]]> 31325980
An England divided. From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history.

They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is ‘clipping�� �� the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death.

A charismatic leader, Hartley cares for the poor and uses violence and intimidation against his opponents. He is also prone to self-delusion and strange visions of mythical creatures.

When excise officer William Deighton vows to bring down the Coiners and one of their own becomes turncoat, Hartley’s empire begins to crumble. With the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, the fate of his empire is under threat.

Forensically assembled from historical accounts and legal documents, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance that combines poetry, landscape, crime and historical fiction, whose themes continue to resonate. Here is a rarely-told alternative history of the North.]]> 371 Benjamin Myers Anne 0 to-read 4.10 2017
author: Benjamin Myers
name: Anne
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 43412959 After all, there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you're lucky.

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

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

From the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole comes a powerful new novel about an unlikely friendship between a young man and an older woman, set in the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay in the aftermath of the Second World War.]]> 260 Benjamin Myers 1526611317 Anne 0 to-read 4.24 2019
author: Benjamin Myers
name: Anne
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 55994372
Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives.

As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593329825.]]> 400 Miranda Cowley Heller Anne 2 3.73 2021
author: Miranda Cowley Heller
name: Anne
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
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]]> 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 Anne 2 3.55 2023
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Anne
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
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]]> 23164913 How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.

Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.]]> 372 Ali Smith 0375424105 Anne 0 to-read 3.68 2014
author: Ali Smith
name: Anne
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/09
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]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women �� and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—T�ܰ��Ա��
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Anne 3 4.05 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Anne
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Anne 3 3.70 2006
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Anne
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 5129 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine�� (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 268 Aldous Huxley 0060929871 Anne 3 3.99 1932
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Anne
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
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]]> 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life,��Three Days in June��is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Anne 0 to-read 3.61 2025
author: Anne Tyler
name: Anne
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/01
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]]> 167216
In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls—a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boys—only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.
A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitteridge to millions of readers.]]> 304 Elizabeth Strout 0375705198 Anne 0 to-read 3.82 1998
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Anne
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/01
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]]> 58709846 The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.]]> 400 Liu Cixin Anne 3 4.15 2006
author: Liu Cixin
name: Anne
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
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]]> 112976332
What makes us fall in love with a song? What makes us want to write our own songs? Do songs help? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs?��

After two New York Times bestsellers that cemented and expanded his legacy as one of America’s best-loved performers and songwriters, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) and How to Write One Song , Jeff Tweedy is back with another disarming, beautiful, and inspirational book about why we listen to music, why we love songs, and how music can connect us to each other and to ourselves. Featuring fifty songs that have both changed Jeff’s life and influenced his music—including songs by the Replacements, Mavis Staples, the Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, and Billie Eilish—as well as Jeff’s “Rememories,�� dream-like short pieces that related key moments from Jeff’s life, this book is a mix of the musical, the emotional, and the inspirational in the best possible way.]]> 256 Jeff Tweedy 0593472527 Anne 4
Tweedy’s familiar Illinois accent and the speech pattern and mannerisms of our shared Midwestern post-Boomer generation made it feel like I was listening to an old high school friend who loved and listened to a lot of the same music I did, but who was paying even more attention than I was, to the point that he started making his own music.

Tweedy’s generous spirit and chill humor, along with his stories of how the music inspired and shaped him, were just the tonic I needed during this harrowing pre-election season in 2024. As if that’s not enough, I was also dealing with a second bout with COVID.

Thanks, Jeff, for keeping me company for several hours this week and letting me into your world. ]]> 4.00 2023
author: Jeff Tweedy
name: Anne
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/07/17
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I really enjoyed this, especially by listening to the audio of Jeff Tweedy reading his own work aloud. I’m already a fan of his music through Wilco, through his collaboration with Billy Bragg to set some of Woody Guthrie’s trove of unpublished lyrics to music. I’ve gone to the Solid Sound Festival he hosts every two years at MassMoCA.

Tweedy’s familiar Illinois accent and the speech pattern and mannerisms of our shared Midwestern post-Boomer generation made it feel like I was listening to an old high school friend who loved and listened to a lot of the same music I did, but who was paying even more attention than I was, to the point that he started making his own music.

Tweedy’s generous spirit and chill humor, along with his stories of how the music inspired and shaped him, were just the tonic I needed during this harrowing pre-election season in 2024. As if that’s not enough, I was also dealing with a second bout with COVID.

Thanks, Jeff, for keeping me company for several hours this week and letting me into your world.
]]> 34267285
Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers�� quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed-to-a-shine, and dead in her catalog-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There’s nothing unusual about her—except that Antoinette’s seen her somewhere before.

And that her death won’t stay in its neat by-numbers box. Other detectives are trying to push Antoinette and Steve into arresting Aislinn’s boyfriend, fast. There’s a shadowy figure at the end of Antoinetteʼs road. Aislinnʼs friend is hinting that she knew Aislinn was in danger. And everything they find out about Aislinn takes her further from the glossy, passive doll she seemed to be.

Antoinette knows the harassment has turned her paranoid, but she can’t tell just how far gone she is. Is this case another step in the campaign to force her off the squad, or are there darker currents flowing beneath its polished surface?]]> 464 Tana French 0143110381 Anne 4 3.97 2016
author: Tana French
name: Anne
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> 77264982
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls�� reformatory school―where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.

Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As Fitzgerald navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre.

From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night�� to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form.

Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records.

A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the 20th century. 30 black-and-white images]]> 592 Judith Tick 039324105X Anne 4
You should either know Ella Fitzgerald’s music already, or be prepared to stop reading the book to listen to the songs mentioned, after which you will become a fan if you weren’t already one.

She is already my favorite singer, so I knew most of the songs mentioned. I still stopped reading to play them sometimes, or to play the rare one I hadn’t heard. The book made me want to dig up old footage of Ella performing, if I can find it. ]]> 3.70
author: Judith Tick
name: Anne
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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Very thorough and revelatory about Ella as an artist, performer, musician, bandleader and composer, rather than just the perfect singer I have always loved through her recordings and the one time I saw her live in the mid-1980s. I remember the first song I heard that made me a fan: “Harlem,�� with Duke Ellington.

You should either know Ella Fitzgerald’s music already, or be prepared to stop reading the book to listen to the songs mentioned, after which you will become a fan if you weren’t already one.

She is already my favorite singer, so I knew most of the songs mentioned. I still stopped reading to play them sometimes, or to play the rare one I hadn’t heard. The book made me want to dig up old footage of Ella performing, if I can find it.
]]> 11573 The Dead Zone.

Johnny Smith, the small-town schoolteacher who spun the wheel of fortune and won a four-and-a-half-year trip into The Dead Zone.

John Smith, who awakened from an interminable coma with an accursed power—the power to see the future and the terrible fate awaiting mankind in The Dead Zone.

~]]> 402 Stephen King 0451155750 Anne 4 3.96 1979
author: Stephen King
name: Anne
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/19
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> 44037144
One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year-old men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today--Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin' age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, forty-four years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives and that of a significant other are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are . . . also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship's bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community.
�������� For both longtime fans and lucky newcomers, Chances Are . . . is a stunning demonstration of a highly acclaimed author deepening and expanding his remarkable achievement.]]> 320 Richard Russo 1101947748 Anne 3 3.70 2017
author: Richard Russo
name: Anne
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/19
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.�� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent�� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Anne 3 3.95 2009
author: Colum McCann
name: Anne
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/10
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]]>