Adam's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 17:55:34 -0700 60 Adam's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume II (Book II)]]> 208511276 Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume from one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.

Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.

And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.� She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.

Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion―taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages―a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.]]> 176 Solvej Balle 0811237273 Adam 0 currently-reading 4.17 2020 On the Calculation of Volume II (Book II)
author: Solvej Balle
name: Adam
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> After Dark 17803 In After Dark—a gripping novel of late night encounters—Murakami’s trademark humor and psychological insight are distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.]]> 191 Haruki Murakami 0307265838 Adam 0 to-read 3.75 2004 After Dark
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Adam
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

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

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Adam 4 2025 3.91 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Adam
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: 2025
review:
“It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable.�
]]> <![CDATA[Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West]]> 75243

Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize]]> 592 William Cronon 0393308731 Adam 5 research, 2025 Required fucking reading. 4.25 1991 Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
author: William Cronon
name: Adam
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: research, 2025
review:
Required fucking reading.
]]> <![CDATA[All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me]]> 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 Adam 5 2025 4.00 2023 All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
author: Patrick Bringley
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: 2025
review:
One of H-F’s own so inherently biased. Perhaps a tad saccharine for my taste but heartfelt and interesting and thoughtful. Art is cool, I like it.
]]> The Imagined Life 216522659 From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer, a taut, elegiac novel about a man trying to uncover the truth about the father who left him behind

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.

As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents� legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.

Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.]]> 288 Andrew Porter 0593538056 Adam 2 2025 4.41 2025 The Imagined Life
author: Andrew Porter
name: Adam
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2025
review:
Left me sad, agitated, and unsatisfied.
]]> <![CDATA[Stories of Your Life and Others]]> 28503870 ]]> 281 Ted Chiang 1101972122 Adam 4 2025 4.22 2002 Stories of Your Life and Others
author: Ted Chiang
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> Reveille for Radicals 133690 256 Saul D. Alinsky 0679721126 Adam 0 2025, research 3.83 1946 Reveille for Radicals
author: Saul D. Alinsky
name: Adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1946
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2025, research
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal]]> 213702691 Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

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

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

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.]]> 256 Mohammed El-Kurd Adam 0 to-read 4.90 2025 Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
author: Mohammed El-Kurd
name: Adam
average rating: 4.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World]]> 61108472 The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it

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

In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.]]> 720 Malcolm Harris 031659203X Adam 0 to-read 3.91 2023 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
author: Malcolm Harris
name: Adam
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy]]> 133691
This is an important account of a complex and idiosyncratic urban populist who insisted that power was the keystone of social change. Horwitt . . . produce[s] a comprehensive appraisal of Alinksy’s colorful confrontational tactics; as a community organizer and his influence on a succeeding generation of social activists . . . An insightful and well-written study.”� Library Journal]]> 624 Sanford D. Horwitt 067973418X Adam 0 to-read 3.94 1989 Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy
author: Sanford D. Horwitt
name: Adam
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Revolution in the city 160713303 123 Vincent J. Giese Adam 0 2025, research 0.0 Revolution in the city
author: Vincent J. Giese
name: Adam
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025, research
review:
From the closed stacks at Harold Washington. “We expect no earthly paradise in our city.�
]]> The Future of the Novel 214274176 Author and essayist Simon Okotie interprets the signposts � evident through the history of the novel � that point to the form’s fate.

We’re used to the novel being declared dead, dying, or endangered. Seemingly every few years, a critic will read it the last rites � yet the form remains more popular than ever with readers. In The Future of the Novel, author Simon Okotie presents a bold future for long-form fiction, and suggests its evolution is far from over.

Okotie begins by responding to and critiquing John Carruthers� book Scheherezade, or The Future of the English Novel, published in 1927 as part of the ‘To-day and To-morrow� series � the inspiration for our present-day FUTURES. He then cites others who have since meditated on the direction of the Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Zadie Smith, and China Miéville, among others. In doing so, he also tells the story of the novel itself, from the realism of the 18th and 19th centuries, through the early stirrings of modernism with its focus on the ‘inner life�, right through to the abstraction and experimentation of 21st century postmodernism, and beyond.

All of which informs Okotie’s own future vision for the novel � one that extends even further into the reaches of the subconscious, and speculates on the uneasy role artifical intelligence will play in the coming decades.

The Future of The Novel is a rich and immersive portrait of an artform which, despite constant claims to the contrary, is more alive and exciting than ever.]]> 128 Simon Okotie 1685891616 Adam 0 research, 2025 4.00 The Future of the Novel
author: Simon Okotie
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: research, 2025
review:

]]> The Night Trembles 203914602
This new award-winning novel is from Nadia Terranova, author of Farewell Ghosts, a finalist for the 2019 Premio Strega, and is translated by Ann Goldstein, who also was the translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet.

“There is something stronger than pain, and that is habit.� Eleven-year-old Nicola knows this well. Each night he is tied up in the cellar by his mother, the wife of Calabria’s biggest bergamot producer. There he waits for the sun to rise, and with it a sliver of freedom. On the other side of the sea, Barbara has just arrived in Messina and plans to escape her father, who pulls her towards marriage with a man she does not love. Liberty will be granted to both, but it will come at a very high price.

On December 28th, 1908, the earth shakes. Europe’s most devastating earthquake razes the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria and, along with them, everything Nicola and Barbara have known. From the ruins, each must piece back together a life and start anew. Written in Nadia Terranova’s distinctively lyric style, The Night Trembles is a melancholic ode to human resilience and the promise of the unknown.]]> 192 Nadia Terranova 1644214091 Adam 4 2025 3.80 2022 The Night Trembles
author: Nadia Terranova
name: Adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: 2025
review:
“The memory was always excessive or deficient.�
]]> Notes from an Island 207567930 Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty.

'... Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing.
She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It's all peace and quiet now.']]> 128 Tove Jansson 1643264796 Adam 4 2025 Beautiful book. 4.08 1996 Notes from an Island
author: Tove Jansson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025
review:
Beautiful book.
]]> The Summer Book 79550
Full of brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own experience and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of the novels she wrote for adults. This new edition sees the return of a European literary gem—fresh, authentic and deeply humane.]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0954221710 Adam 0 to-read 4.05 1972 The Summer Book
author: Tove Jansson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Orlando 54560534
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. By the close, three centuries have passed, and he will have transformed into a thirty-six-year-old woman in the year 1928. Orlando’s journey is also an internal one—he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matter of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man.

Virginia Woolf’s most unusual creation, Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.]]> 352 Virginia Woolf 015670160X Adam 3 2025 3.91 1928 Orlando
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Adam
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025
review:
This is an interesting and good, maybe great, novel that induced in me a profound reading slump. I’m so happy it’s over.
]]> <![CDATA[The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives]]> 106092 The Art of Dramatic Writing, does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel, or screenplay.
Examining a play from the inside out, Egri starts with the heart of any drama: its characters. All good dramatic writing hinges on people and their relationships, which serve to move the story forward and give it life, as well as an understanding of human motives - why people act the way that they do. Using examples from everything from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Egri shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise - a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behavior - and to develop the dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior.
Using Egri's ABCs of premise, character, and conflict, The Art of Dramatic Writing is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in writing.]]> 305 Lajos Egri Adam 0 to-read 4.18 1942 The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives
author: Lajos Egri
name: Adam
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back]]> 233737 355 Thomas Geoghegan 1565848861 Adam 5 2025, research 4.18 1991 Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back
author: Thomas Geoghegan
name: Adam
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: 2025, research
review:
Arguably the best and inarguably the funniest book ever written about the American labor movement.
]]> <![CDATA[Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America]]> 217446872 A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.� Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today’s job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job� keeps hope alive.]]> 352 Erik Baker 0674293606 Adam 0 to-read 4.47 Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
author: Erik Baker
name: Adam
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Adam 4 2025 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Adam
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2025
review:
This sagged for me about two-thirds of the way through but it was a modest sag. Bruno's emails are the meat on this bone. “Maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent that you begin to locate a way to escape it.�
]]> <![CDATA[So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,� Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,� a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,� a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Adam 4 2025, that-s-what-she-read 3.98 2022 So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
author: Claire Keegan
name: Adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: 2025, that-s-what-she-read
review:
Some awful men in these stories!
]]> <![CDATA[In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)]]> 2459785
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a 12-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox (his partner and closest friend) find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspense.]]> 448 Tana French Adam 0 to-read 3.83 2007 In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)
author: Tana French
name: Adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Audition 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Adam 5 2025 3.82 2025 Audition
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Adam
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: 2025
review:
I am overwhelmed and unsettled by this one. Clever transitions, excellent tension. Oblique but at the right scale. "The recognition comes and goes, too many parts—those onstage and in life—don’t endure and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain." Middle-age, what a thing.
]]> Chicago: The Second City 243493 144 A.J. Liebling 0803280351 Adam 3 2025, research 3.44 2004 Chicago: The Second City
author: A.J. Liebling
name: Adam
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: 2025, research
review:
This reporting is interesting, in that it’s conisderably worse than I would have expected.
]]> <![CDATA[The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty]]> 218569847 The riveting saga of the Seabrooks of New Jersey, by one of the New Yorker’s most acclaimed storytellers.


“Having left this material for his writer son, my father must have wanted the story told, even if he couldn’t bear to tell it himself.


So begins the multigenerational story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey that became as wealthy, glamorous, and powerful as Gilded Age aristocrats. The autocratic patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the “Henry Ford of agriculture.� His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Lifecalled “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.� But the carefully cultivated facade—glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden cellars of world-class wine, and movie stars skinny-dipping in the pool—hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. In a compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge, John Seabrook explores his complicated family legacy and dark corners of the American Dream.]]> 368 John Seabrook 1324003529 Adam 0 to-read 4.33 2025 The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
author: John Seabrook
name: Adam
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Among Friends 219520678 The announcement of a major literary debut: What begins as a celebration takes a sudden turn when a shocking betrayal shatters the trust between families.

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday.

Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the drinks, dinners, rituals, and games that form their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.

This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt into an unspeakable act, the ramifications of which are enormous. Accusations, denials, and shattered illusions follow, driving wedges between friends, spouses, children and parents, and exposing the treacherous fault lines on which these families have dwelt.

Written with hypnotic elegance and molten precision, and announcing the arrival of a major literary talent, Hal Ebbott’s Among Friends examines the aftermath of betrayal within the sanctuary of a defining relationship. It explores themes of class, marriage, friendship, and power, as well as the things we tell ourselves to preserve our finely made worlds.]]> 320 Hal Ebbott 0593854195 Adam 0 to-read 3.96 2025 Among Friends
author: Hal Ebbott
name: Adam
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Pan 220687903 “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.� ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.]]> 336 Michael Clune 0593834429 Adam 0 to-read 4.67 Pan
author: Michael Clune
name: Adam
average rating: 4.67
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Every Arc Bends Its Radian 207293958 From PEN Award­­–winning author Sergio de la Pava comes an existential detective novel about a private investigator who flees New York City for Colombia after a personal tragedy and finds himself entangled in a young woman’s strange disappearance—which may be connected to one of the world’s most ruthless criminal organizations. Riv—poet, philosopher, private eye—arrives in Cali, Colombia, hoping to find nothing. Running away from his family and an unspeakable event surrounding his ex-wife Jane, Riv accidentally connects with his cousin Mauro and great Aunt Corelletta who asks him to find her daughter Angelica Alfa. No sooner is Riv on the trail when it becomes clear that not only are the cops not looking for Angelica, but they are actively preventing him from finding her. This could be a good thing because the police are clearly in the pocket of one Exeter Mondragon, a name best never uttered in public if one wants to stay alive. But Riv is not one to leave things incomplete. When his investigation leads him straight into the heart of Mondragon’s criminal empire, he is forced not only to face unimaginable horrors, but also to plunge into the deepest and most perplexing conundrums of the human condition. Lightning fast on the page and steeped in the cultural history of Columbia, Every Arc Bends Its Radian is a novel only Sergio de la Pava could write. As incredibly funny as it is ridiculously smart, it poses large philosophical questions while keeping you laughing. A novel idea about the biggest idea of them all—what in God’s name are we even put on earth for, this book is a singular exploration of the human mind.]]> 265 Sergio de la Pava 1668056704 Adam 4 2025 3.17 Every Arc Bends Its Radian
author: Sergio de la Pava
name: Adam
average rating: 3.17
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: 2025
review:
Hard to rate this one. Points for the Elliott Gouldish private dick banter, the wide-ranging philosophizing, some truly arresting imagery, and the hatred of AI. Points deducted for unmooring swings in tone, mild placelessness (despite its purposeful setting), and an almost whacky conclusion. It’s true, no one knows anything. (I also leaned the actual origin of Devils’s Advocate, which I somehow didn’t know!)
]]> <![CDATA[Studs Terkel's Chicago by Terkel, Studs]]> 149118097
Its literary and journalistic history is just as dazzling, and includes Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and Sara Paretsky. From Al Capone to the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Chicago, in the words of Studs Terkel, “has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast woman—a reputation.�

Chicago was also home to Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian, who moved to Chicago in 1922 as an eight-year-old and who would make it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. This book is a splendid evocation of Studs Terkel’s hometown in all its glory—and all its imperfection.]]> Studs Terkel Adam 4 research, 2024 3.86 1986 Studs Terkel's Chicago by Terkel, Studs
author: Studs Terkel
name: Adam
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: research, 2024
review:
Read the Algren but don’t skip this one, either. “He is, and all of us are, twice blessed and twice deceived.�
]]> Whale Fall 195888522 A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.]]> 224 Elizabeth O'Connor 0593700910 Adam 3 2024 3.80 2024 Whale Fall
author: Elizabeth O'Connor
name: Adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: 2024
review:
Sound premise/setting, not a bad novel, maybe even a good one, but not sure it worked fully on me. Something about the impressionism of it, and the noble+wise depiction of the protagonist, which might overcorrect for old/crummy depictions of young women.
]]> The Rehearsal 7381740 320 Eleanor Catton 0316074330 Adam 0 to-read 3.44 2008 The Rehearsal
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Adam
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Advise and Consent (Advise and Consent)]]> 159346
"I can recall no other novel in which there is so well presented a president's dilemma when his awful responsibility for the nation's interest conflicts with a personal code of good morals." (The New York Times)]]> 616 Allen Drury 0380010070 Adam 0 to-read 4.08 1959 Advise and Consent (Advise and Consent)
author: Allen Drury
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Collected Stories 18002758 James Salter is one of the finest writers of our time. From his first published story in the Paris Review in 1968, Salter's work in the form has been universally acclaimed: five have appeared in O. Henry collections, Dusk and Other Stories won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and more recently he was the recipient of PEN USA's 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2010 REA Prize for the short story, and the 2012 PEN/Malamud Award.


Each indelible narrative in the Collected Stories is marked by Salter's great literary grace, his ability to show the subtleties of a character or situation with precision, and his equally assured ability to command reversals of fortune or shocking revelations. The stories concern men and women in their most intimate moments, struggling with loss, desire, or the burden of memory. A fallen rider lies in a field, alone but for the knowledge that these may be her last twenty minutes. A man assisting in his wife's suicide is devastated by the aftermath. Two New York attorneys on a trip to Italy discover that their recent wealth affords them the possibility of a higher life, the reality of which is somewhat sordid. A young woman is unable to share a life-changing piece of news with her closest friends.

]]> 303 James Salter 1447239385 Adam 0 to-read 4.03 2013 Collected Stories
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cassada 174625 224 James Salter 1582431868 Adam 0 to-read 3.76 2000 Cassada
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Solo Faces 320069
James Salter captures the adventure of Gary, a roofer of churches, who feels restrained by conventions and flat ground. Unable to find happiness in his life, he travels to southern France to climb to the summits of the Alps. He finds peace and happiness within himself soon after. But when fellow climbers are trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one-man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always shunned. But the glory quickly dissapates and he returns to the anonymity he prefers, having thoroughly satisfied himself.]]> 218 James Salter 0865473218 Adam 0 to-read 3.93 1979 Solo Faces
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hunters 174621
Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill--sometimes under dubious circumstances--Cleve's luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, The Hunters is a landmark in the literature of war.]]> 233 James Salter 0375703926 Adam 0 to-read 4.13 1956 The Hunters
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Last Night 18757 144 James Salter 1400078415 Adam 0 to-read 3.89 2005 Last Night
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction]]> 213395533 The celebrated National Book Award–winning writer’s intimate exploration of how fact is transformed into fiction.


In this thoughtful collection of essays, Andrea Barrett draws from her experiences writing some of the most acclaimed historical fiction of our time to explore the mysteries and delights of the genre. Inspiration found in the past, she argues, can illuminate fiction, just as dust scatters light and makes the unseen visible. Delving into some of the largest questions in the genre—How does a writer find meaningful subject matter beyond the confines of their life? How are scraps of history transformed into a fully formed narrative?—Barrett explores how she came to create some of her beloved works and explores lessons gleaned from the work of such masters of historical fiction as including Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, Hilary Mantel, and Colm Tóibín. Candid and elegant, Dust and Light is the perfect book for anyone who loves reading fiction set in the past, as well as for anyone aspiring to write it.]]> 208 Andrea Barrett 1324036508 Adam 4 2024, research 4.00 2025 Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction
author: Andrea Barrett
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: 2024, research
review:
I am currently and actively grappling with some of the questions raised here, about the way fiction writers “transmute, or fail to transmute, those base materials [of history] into something new and strange.� I can recommend but only from this truly self-interested position.
]]> The Seven Stairs 13510918
The Seven Stairs is Stuart Brent's exuberant memoir reveals the strategies and beliefs that made him one of the nation's most colorful and revered independent booksellers.]]> 222 Stuart Brent Adam 3 research, 2024 3.50 1962 The Seven Stairs
author: Stuart Brent
name: Adam
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: research, 2024
review:
I skipped the portions about tv and his lake house in Wisconsin. Dug the rest. This should be reissued.
]]> <![CDATA[Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves]]> 199514774
How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? It’s an everyday act, easily taken for granted, but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. Banquets were held just so guests could enjoy the novelty of eggs, butter, and apples that had been preserved for months in cold storage—and demonstrate that such zombie foods were not deadly. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching an entirely new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but also seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.

In FROSTBITE, New Yorker contributor and co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers with her on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting such off-the-beaten-track landmarks as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s OJ reserves. Today, more than three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but as Twilley soon discovers, the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food, extending the distance between producers and consumers and redefining what “fresh� really means. More importantly, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a U.S.-style cold chain, Twilley asks, can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we? A deeply-researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, FROSTBITE makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.]]> 400 Nicola Twilley 0735223289 Adam 4 research, 2024 4.19 2024 Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
author: Nicola Twilley
name: Adam
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: research, 2024
review:
The idea for the book is better than its execution, but only by a hair. I learned many things, like how "the energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment."
]]> Ship Fever: Stories 92267 1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).]]> 256 Andrea Barrett 0393316009 Adam 0 to-read 4.05 1996 Ship Fever: Stories
author: Andrea Barrett
name: Adam
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flaubert's Parrot 2176 Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality]]> 190 Julian Barnes 0679731369 Adam 0 to-read 3.67 1984 Flaubert's Parrot
author: Julian Barnes
name: Adam
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right]]> 206303798 In her first book since the widely acclaimedStrangers in Their Own Land,the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the “pride paradox� that has given the right’s appeals such resonance. For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. In Stolen Pride, Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Donald Trump has turned lost pride into stolen pride and shame into blame, and that the result of his rhetorical alchemy has been to weaponize that shame and introduce a potent blend of anger and often violent rhetoric—undermining democracy and highlighting revenge.

Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where its residents faced the perfect storm. The city was coal jobs had left, crushing poverty arrived, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region more powerfully than anywhere else in the nation. Although Pikeville had been in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild’s brilliant exploration of how the town responded in 2017, when a white nationalist march came to town—a rehearsal for the deadly “unite the right� march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just four months later—takes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild—whose previous book,Strangers in Their Own Land, was heralded by theNew York Timesas one of a small handful of books to read to understand Trump and the 2016 election—focuses on a group at the center of the shifting political blue-collar men. Long conversations over six years with mayors and felons, clerks and shopkeepers, road workers and teachers, ex-coal miners, and recovering addicts form the core of the book, movingly introducing readers to real people living deep within the political storm.

Hochschild’s great gift is to decode the emotional narratives that demagogues can speak to and lay bare the pain that lies beneath the rage. And in some of the voices she listens to, Hochschild hears an alternative to the inchoate anger, as she and her subjects imagine a way we might build bridges and move forward.]]> 400 Arlie Russell Hochschild 1620976463 Adam 0 to-read 4.04 2024 Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
name: Adam
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Adam 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Adam
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> Memoirs of Hadrian 12172 347 Marguerite Yourcenar 0374529264 Adam 0 to-read 4.27 1951 Memoirs of Hadrian
author: Marguerite Yourcenar
name: Adam
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dusk and Other Stories 4196940 A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, James Salter has long been admired for his clear prose and the brilliance of his style. In this long-awaited first collection of his short fiction there are gathered a dozen of stories that have appeared over the past several years in Esquire, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.

James Salter explores with subtlety the deeply personal worlds of a privileged but insecure class, exposing the bright surface of their lives and probing for what lies beneath—hints of disillusionment, flaws of character. Seemingly without effort he brings forth a prism of human experience, of lives seen from a multiplicity of viewpoints. The stories reflect, turn, and reflect again the myriad moments and details that shape a fate. In one of them, a divorced woman learns that she is about to lose the last thing of real value to her. In another, a callow screenwriter unexpectedly discovers Rome in the true meaning of art and glory. In a third, a rider, far off in the fields, is involved in a grotesque accident—night is falling and she must face it alone.

Each of these stories is told with weighted calm. We are drawn into them as we might be drawn into the secret conversations of strangers, by a lingering swirl of tone, revelation, and insight. The effect is riveting.]]> 157 James Salter 0865472777 Adam 4 2024 Salter, the best. 3.62 1988 Dusk and Other Stories
author: James Salter
name: Adam
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: 2024
review:
Salter, the best.
]]> <![CDATA[The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream]]> 15811511
Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc's McDonald's changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books.

Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel's oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago School of Television, and the improvisational Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment.

Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos—both constructive and destructive—of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War Two. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away “blight� with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost—monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago's role as America's meeting place.

In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.]]> 508 Thomas Dyja 1594204322 Adam 4 2018, 2024, research 3.50 2012 The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream
author: Thomas Dyja
name: Adam
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: 2018, 2024, research
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity]]> 615570 The Artist’s Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life. Still as vital today—or perhaps even more so—than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of The Artist’s Way and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into the creative process that she has gained. Updated and expanded, this anniversary edition reframes The Artist’s Way for a new century.]]> 237 Julia Cameron 1585421464 Adam 0 to-read 3.93 2002 The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
author: Julia Cameron
name: Adam
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Adam 4 2024 3.76 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Adam
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: 2024
review:
“Ultimately they came to believe their own ruses.� [ED NOTE: I started this one day before the NYT named it a book of the year. Now I have to return my library copy.]
]]> The Information 823646 374 Martin Amis 0394281632 Adam 3 2024, that-s-what-she-read 3.76 1995 The Information
author: Martin Amis
name: Adam
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: 2024, that-s-what-she-read
review:
Turned 40 so read about an insecure, jealous writer turning 40. Loved more of this than I hated but hated enough to knock it down a star.
]]> The Tokyo Suite 214204553 The English-language debut of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Brazilian literature, Tokyo Suite is a gripping exploration of the complexities of modern family dynamics and the tensions hiding just under the surface of ordinary lives.

It’s a seemingly ordinary morning when Maju, a nanny, boards a bus with Cora, the young girl she’s been caring for, and disappears. The abduction, an act as impulsive as it is extreme, sets off a series of events that will force each character to confront their deepest fears and desires.

Fernanda, Cora's mother, is a successful executive who is so engulfed in her own personal crisis that she initially fails to notice her daughter's disappearance. Her marriage is strained, and she finds solace in an affair, distancing herself further from her family. Meanwhile, her husband, overwhelmed by the complexities of their domestic life, remains emotionally detached. As Maju navigates the streets of São Paulo with Cora, the “white army� of nannies, a term coined by Fernanda, seems to watch her every move, heightening her sense of paranoia and urgency.

Madalosso’s narrative delves deep into the human psyche, examining themes of maternal guilt, societal expectations, and the search for personal identity. Rich and multi-layered, Tokyo Suite is a poignant and gripping tale that captures the essence of modern urban life and the lengths to which people will go to reclaim a sense of control and meaning in their lives.]]> 208 Giovana Madalosso 1609459806 Adam 0 to-read 3.59 2020 The Tokyo Suite
author: Giovana Madalosso
name: Adam
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> The Dry Heart 42268742 The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.� As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?]]> 88 Natalia Ginzburg 0811228789 Adam 0 to-read 3.98 1947 The Dry Heart
author: Natalia Ginzburg
name: Adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel]]> 205363940 A legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as the director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger Than Fiction, he offers a survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. Starting with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein's and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence, Colette's and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles, and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Frank also shows how Japan’s Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends—and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack, and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and W. G. Sebald. In the manner of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history, and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing, he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.]]> 480 Edwin Frank 0374270961 Adam 0 to-read 4.20 2024 Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
author: Edwin Frank
name: Adam
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> Q 94034 675 Luther Blissett 0156031965 Adam 0 to-read 4.22 1999 Q
author: Luther Blissett
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Wilderness 209283926 A deeply felt chronicle into the wilderness of the first forty days of new motherhood.

In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Ayşegül Savaş becomes fascinated by the mythology around the first forty days after giving birth, and the invisible beings that are said to surround the mother. “In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out.� A friend lends a book that suggests forty days of rest and fortifying broths and avoiding wind and cold.

In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, forty days are seen as a period of trial and transformation. They are often journeys into the wilderness and “its vast and unruly territories.� When the baby arrives, Savaş charts her own path into the wilderness of new motherhood—a space of contradiction, of chaos and care, mothering and being mothered. “What is the trial of the postpartum crossing?� writes Savaş. “Where will mother and child emerge once they have left the wild?”]]> 104 Aysegül Savas Adam 3 2024 4.33 The Wilderness
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Adam
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky]]> 12196824 Radical, Nicholas von Hoffman tells the story of Saul Alinsky, the “father� of community organizing. Von Hoffman, who worked with Alinsky for years, gives a moving, often funny portrait of his mentor, a man who forever changed American politics, along with a rigorous historical analysis of what made his contribution so vital.]]> 256 Nicholas von Hoffman 1568586779 Adam 0 research, 2024 3.67 2010 Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky
author: Nicholas von Hoffman
name: Adam
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: research, 2024
review:

]]> The Adventures of Augie March 11908 586 Saul Bellow 0143039571 Adam 0 currently-reading 3.83 1953 The Adventures of Augie March
author: Saul Bellow
name: Adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> V13: Chronicle of a Trial 207375697
Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history—featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris—was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.

V13 isn’t so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it—a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil—and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.]]> 320 Emmanuel Carrère 0374615705 Adam 4 2024 4.41 2022 V13: Chronicle of a Trial
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Adam
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: 2024
review:
“No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity, and presence.�
]]> Theory & Practice 213619983 With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1646222873 Adam 0 to-read 3.68 2024 Theory & Practice
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Adam
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> Optional Practical Training 211934937 An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America

Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.

Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.]]> 256 Shubha Sunder 164445324X Adam 0 to-read 4.22 2025 Optional Practical Training
author: Shubha Sunder
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens� Call: Inner Life in the Age of Attention Capitalism]]> 217370329 From the New York Times bestselling author and television and podcast host, a powerful, wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.

We all feel it � the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ‘With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. The Sirens� Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 310 Chris Hayes 1761386107 Adam 0 to-read 4.20 2025 The Sirens’ Call: Inner Life in the Age of Attention Capitalism
author: Chris Hayes
name: Adam
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> The Angle of Falling Light 217247907 In this her fifth novel, Gologorsky returns to the setting of all her books—the American working class of Long Island and the Bronx, where the last two generations of Americans have been scarred by the domestic side of foreign wars and by drugs—from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, from heroin to oxycodone—good people seeking a good life amidst obstacles that can seem insurmountable.

In The Angle of Falling Light, the protagonist Tessa, has no model close to her for the kind of life she’d like to lead. Her sister Marla starts usingdrugs,following the lead of theiruncle Hack,who softens his days with alcohol and weed. Her stepfather Scotty is a vet struggling with depression, and her momNina can’t cope. Nina takes refuge with a new lover and Tess, too, finds safety in a new relationship if not the direction she sodesperatelyseeks.

The Angle of Falling Light is an urgent book, with a big cast of troubled innocents, everyone looking for a way forward, a lesson in how to give love while still putting yourself first, one of the most difficult of life’s challenges. As Gologorsky has it, some will lose this battle, while others will at least survive it.]]> 304 Beverly Gologorsky 1644214636 Adam 0 to-read 0.0 The Angle of Falling Light
author: Beverly Gologorsky
name: Adam
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> Sister Europe 215361985 An irresistible and poignant novel about the upper echelons of Berlin society, a grand literary celebration, and the afterparty that upends the night and carries a group of guests deeper into the city.

Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award-winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best the troubled innocent Livia, and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.

But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his much younger internet date—she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake”—and Demian’s 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema's infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose catastrophic pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.

With sophistication and tenderness, Nell Zink weaves a vividly colored tapestry of a milieu at odds with itself, taking her trademark ambiguity, daring and humor to new heights.]]> 208 Nell Zink 0593534913 Adam 0 to-read 3.56 2025 Sister Europe
author: Nell Zink
name: Adam
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> The Antidote 214537790 FromPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

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

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Adam 0 to-read 4.01 2025 The Antidote
author: Karen Russell
name: Adam
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> I Sailed with Magellan 153197 320 Stuart Dybek 0312424116 Adam 4 research, 2024 4.08 2003 I Sailed with Magellan
author: Stuart Dybek
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: research, 2024
review:
Often brutal stories that make me feel all warm inside. “Feeling insists upon being expressed, even if only in secret as prayer.�
]]> The Talented Miss Farwell 49203379
But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely—a quiet single woman known as Becky who still lives in her family’s farmhouse, wears sensible shoes, and works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller.

No one understands the ins and outs of Pierson’s accounts better than Becky; she’s the last one in the office every night, crunching the numbers. Somehow, her neighbors marvel, she always finds a way to get the struggling town just a little more money. What Pierson doesn’t see—and can never discover—is that much of that money is shifted into a separate account that she controls, “borrowed� funds used to finance her art habit. Though she quietly repays Pierson when she can, the business of art is cutthroat and unpredictable.

But as Reba Farwell’s deals get bigger and bigger, Becky Farwell’s debt to Pierson spirals out of control. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?]]> 352 Emily Gray Tedrowe 0062897721 Adam 0 currently-reading 3.46 2020 The Talented Miss Farwell
author: Emily Gray Tedrowe
name: Adam
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Historical Studies of Urban America)]]> 55551853
Hirsch’s classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when the city dealt with its rapidly growing Black population not by working to abolish its stark segregation but by expanding and solidifying it. Even as the civil rights movement rose to prominence, Chicago exploited a variety of methods of segregation—including riots, redevelopment, and a host of new legal frameworks—that provided a national playbook for the emergence of a new kind of entrenched inequality. Hirsch’s chronicle of the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the Great Migration of Southern Blacks in the mid-twentieth century makes startingly clear how the violent reactions of an emergent white population found common ground with policy makers to segregate first a city and then the nation.

This enlarged edition of Making the Second Ghetto features a visionary afterword by historian N. D. B. Connolly, explaining why Hirsch’s book still crackles with “blistering relevance� for contemporary readers.]]> 397 Arnold R. Hirsch 022672851X Adam 5 research, 2024 4.00 1983 Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Historical Studies of Urban America)
author: Arnold R. Hirsch
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1983
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: research, 2024
review:
"A dynamic institution, not a dead inheritance from the past."
]]> 10:04 20613582 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.]]> 256 Ben Lerner 0865478104 Adam 4 2024 3.78 2014 10:04
author: Ben Lerner
name: Adam
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Cuyahoga 54264870 Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

�Cuyahoga is tragic and comic, hilarious and inventive—a 19th-century legend for 21st-century America� (The Boston Globe).

Big Son is a spirit of the times—the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders, shiny hair, and church-organ laugh, Big Son practically made Ohio City all by himself. The feats of this proto-superhero have earned him wonder and whiskey, but very little in the way of fortune. And without money, Big cannot become an honest husband to his beloved Cloe (who may or may not want to be his honest wife).

In pursuit of a steady wage, our hero hits the (dirt) streets of Ohio City and Cleveland, the twin towns racing to become the first great metropolis of the West. Their rivalry reaches a boil over the building of a bridge across the Cuyahoga River—and Big stumbles right into the kettle. The resulting misadventures involve elderly terrorists, infrastructure collapse, steamboat races, wild pigs, and multiple ruined weddings.

Narrating this “very funny, rambunctious debut novel� (Los Angeles Times) tale is Medium Son—known as Meed—apprentice coffin maker, almanac author, orphan, and the younger brother of Big. Meed finds himself swept up in the action, and he is forced to choose between brotherly love and his own ambitions. His uncanny voice—plain but profound, colloquial but poetic—elevates a slapstick frontier tale into a “breezy fable of empire, class, conquest, and ecocide� (The New York Times Book Review).

Evoking the Greek classics and the Bible alongside nods to Looney Tunes, Charles Portis, and Flannery O’Connor, Pete Beatty has written “a hilarious and moving exploration of family, home, and fate [and] you won’t read anything else like it this year� (BuzzFeed).]]> 272 Pete Beatty 1982155574 Adam 5 2020
“We are come to a day of dollars and steam factories and not spirit piss.�

Thwok thwok thwok]]> 4.08 2020 Cuyahoga
author: Pete Beatty
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/21
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: 2020
review:
Hidy, Pete. And hell yes.

“We are come to a day of dollars and steam factories and not spirit piss.�

Thwok thwok thwok
]]> The Last Picture Show 50051 280 Larry McMurtry 0752837214 Adam 4 3.98 1966 The Last Picture Show
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Picture Show (The Last Picture Show, #1)]]> 11021555 The Last Picture Show is one of Larry McMurtry's most powerful, memorable novels -- the basis for the enormously popular movie of the same name. Set in a small, dusty, Texas town, The Last Picture Show introduced the characters of Jacy, Duane, and teenagers stumbling toward adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love. Populated by a wonderful cast of eccentrics and animated by McMurtry's wry and raucous humor, The Last Picture Show is wild, heartbreaking, and poignant -- a coming-of-age novel that resonates with the magical passion of youth.]]> 290 Larry McMurtry 1451606583 Adam 4 2016 4.06 1966 The Last Picture Show (The Last Picture Show, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Adam
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/14
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: 2016
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Meaningful Life (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 3979476 214 L.J. Davis 1590173007 Adam 3 2024, research 3.60 1971 A Meaningful Life (New York Review Books Classics)
author: L.J. Davis
name: Adam
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: 2024, research
review:
This is a seriously funny book about a moron, and as satire it works only to a point.
]]> <![CDATA[Health and Safety: A Breakdown]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”�New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Adam 0 to-read 3.51 2024 Health and Safety: A Breakdown
author: Emily Witt
name: Adam
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hypocrite 202102022 From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might hope, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with, and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.]]> 240 Jo Hamya 0593701038 Adam 0 to-read 3.42 2024 The Hypocrite
author: Jo Hamya
name: Adam
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Finishing School (Canons) by Muriel Spark (2016-04-07)]]> 124016020
Into Rowland’s creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a red-haired literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots, has already excited the interest of publishers. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse fraught with jealousy and attraction, both literary and sexual.]]> Muriel Spark Adam 0 to-read 4.33 2004 The Finishing School (Canons) by Muriel Spark (2016-04-07)
author: Muriel Spark
name: Adam
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Signs Preceding the End of the World]]> 21535546 Winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.

Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages � one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.]]> 114 Yuri Herrera 1908276428 Adam 0 to-read 3.90 2009 Signs Preceding the End of the World
author: Yuri Herrera
name: Adam
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Atmospheric Disturbances 6081536 A Salon.com Top Ten Book of the Year
A Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Best Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year

Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances is a "witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling" ( Booklist ) novel about the mysterious nature of human relationships.

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single confounding a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulatcrum. But Leo is not fooled, and he knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the real Rema is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim her. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey--who believes himself to be a secret agent able to control the weather--his investigation leads him from the streets of New York City to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, in search of the woman he loves.]]> 256 Rivka Galchen 031242843X Adam 4 that-s-what-she-read, 2024 3.14 2008 Atmospheric Disturbances
author: Rivka Galchen
name: Adam
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: that-s-what-she-read, 2024
review:
I’ve really been meaning to read Borges.
]]> <![CDATA[The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (Chicago Visions and Revisions)]]> 41591105
In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents� deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.
]]> 320 Carlo Rotella 022662403X Adam 4 research, 2024 4.00 2019 The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (Chicago Visions and Revisions)
author: Carlo Rotella
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: research, 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia]]> 60784843 The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies--vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire.

In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, and the culmination of ideas that he explored in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archeologist David Wengrow).

Graeber explores how the proto-democratic practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.]]> 208 David Graeber 0374610193 Adam 3 2024 3.32 2023 Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
author: David Graeber
name: Adam
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Us Fools 206550501 A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents� volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents� realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.]]> 340 Nora Lange 1953387519 Adam 0 to-read 3.04 2024 Us Fools
author: Nora Lange
name: Adam
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The House on Mango Street 139253 The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero.

Told in a series of vignettes � sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.]]> 110 Sandra Cisneros 0679734775 Adam 4 2024, research 3.69 1984 The House on Mango Street
author: Sandra Cisneros
name: Adam
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: 2024, research
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore]]> 201751300 An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see those stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.

Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including The Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who appeared to sign books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.]]> 416 Evan Friss 0593299922 Adam 0 to-read 3.93 2024 The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
author: Evan Friss
name: Adam
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Season of the Swamp 205363990
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.]]> 160 Yuri Herrera 164445307X Adam 4 2024 3.62 2022 Season of the Swamp
author: Yuri Herrera
name: Adam
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[No Storm, Just Weather (The German List)]]> 62622112
Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, A woman strikes up a conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will return the following Saturday. She cannot wait . . .

In 1981 she came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met Viktor, who was twice her age. Though he opened the world up to her, he remained closed himself. At the turn of the millennium and thirty-six, she meets Johann. He is thirty-six too. They try to make a life together, but their jobs aren’t the only things that are precarious. Saturday morning, Tegel Airport For six days, her everyday life and her memories have become entwined. Why are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person she remembers? Or, being someone who knows their way around the mind, is she in fact what she has forgotten?
]]> 200 Judith Kuckart 1803091487 Adam 0 to-read 3.00 2019 No Storm, Just Weather (The German List)
author: Judith Kuckart
name: Adam
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Sisters K 182110735 380 Maureen Sun 1961884062 Adam 0 to-read 3.53 2024 The Sisters K
author: Maureen Sun
name: Adam
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)]]> 208324
Here, Johnson’s almost mythic personality—part genius, part behemoth, at once hotly emotional and icily calculating—is seen at its most nakedly ambitious. This multifaceted book carries the President-to-be from the aftermath of his devastating defeat in his 1941 campaign for the Senate-the despair it engendered in him, and the grueling test of his spirit that followed as political doors slammed shut-through his service in World War II (and his artful embellishment of his record) to the foundation of his fortune (and the actual facts behind the myth he created about it).

The culminating drama—the explosive heart of the book—is Caro’s illumination, based on extraordinarily detailed investigation, of one of the great political mysteries of the century. Having immersed himself in Johnson’s life and world, Caro is able to reveal the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson was not believed capable of winning, which he “had to� win or face certain political death, and which he did win-by 87 votes, the �87 votes that changed history.�

Telling that epic story “in riveting and eye-opening detail,� Caro returns to the American consciousness a magnificent lost hero. He focuses closely not only on Johnson, whom we see harnessing every last particle of his strategic brilliance and energy, but on Johnson’s “unbeatable� opponent, the beloved former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, who embodied in his own life the myth of the cowboy knight and was himself a legend for his unfaltering integrity. And ultimately, as the political duel between the two men quickens—carrying with it all the confrontational and moral drama of the perfect Western—Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new—the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.]]> 522 Robert A. Caro 067973371X Adam 5 2024 4.26 1990 Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Adam
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: 2024
review:
Everyone out here reading The Power Broker, SMDH.
]]> Never Let Me Go 331679
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro Adam 5 2024 3.74 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Adam
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/31
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: 2024
review:
Somehow had never gotten to it. A real Holy Shit novel. He’s the greatest.
]]> Nature's Perfect Food 743284
For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?

Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, " The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.

In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.]]> 304 E. Melanie DuPuis 0814719384 Adam 0 research, 2024 3.68 2002 Nature's Perfect Food
author: E. Melanie DuPuis
name: Adam
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: research, 2024
review:

]]> The Future Was Color 195931090 A dazzling novel about making art, desire, and the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of post-war Los Angeles, for readers of Garth Greenwell and Eve Babitz

George is a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Los Angeles. He must navigate the McCarthy era studio system filled with possible Communists and spies; the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard; the inability of the era to disassemble love from persecution and guilt. But when a famous actress named Madeleine offers George a “writing residency� at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world changes dramatically. Soon it’s drinks by the pool every night, pleasure in every direction, and Madeleine carrying him like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him.

What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this endless bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they’d thought they left behind. Beneath his newfound relationships lie the pernicious forces of the American political project. And what George can never escape: his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war, landing in New York all alone a decade prior. In New York as in California, the people he loves aren’t what they seem—and neither is his adopted country, one pretending to have transcended bigotry, authoritarianism, and violence. It is a novel as well as a historical document, upending our perceptions of just how personal the political can be.

Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles, to hidden corners of working-class New York, to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of making art and reinventing the self, post-war American decadence, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.]]> 224 Patrick Nathan 1640096248 Adam 3 2024 3.62 2024 The Future Was Color
author: Patrick Nathan
name: Adam
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The Heart in Winter 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Adam 0 to-read 3.80 2024 The Heart in Winter
author: Kevin Barry
name: Adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)]]> 61215351 One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.]]> 432 J.R.R. Tolkien Adam 0 to-read 4.52 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Adam
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi]]> 204316858 A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long. Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved.In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least nine people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation. Even in the context of the brutal caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map.As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power.It implicates all of us.In The Barn, Thompson befriends the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well.Wheeler Parker’s journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its oldest, deepest wound.]]> 448 Wright Thompson 0593299825 Adam 4 2024, research 4.37 2024 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
author: Wright Thompson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: 2024, research
review:
"We believe in the goodness of the people we love. We believe our ancestors must have shared our values because of the blood we share, and the land we share. We believe so that we might get up in the morning and walk into the light. But we know. Somewhere we know."
]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)]]> 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 Adam 0 to-read 3.85 2008 Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In the Eye of the Wild 59110368 In the Eye of the Wild begins with a terrifying account of the anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s nearly fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear while conducting research in Siberia. As an anthropologist, Martin has made a name for the fullness of her engagement with the peoples she studies. In her dangerous encounter with the bear, however, she faced something else altogether: the animal. Left severely mutilated, she undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, whose ghastly chief surgeon sports a mouthful of gold teeth and presides over a harem of young nurses. Back in France, she is put through new operations, meant to fix the work done in Russia, from which she emerges even more damaged. She comes to the conclusion that she must return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Evens people call it, a miedka, a person who is not only human but beast. That is the only way for her to continue her work as an anthropologist and to reconstitute herself as person.]]> 128 Nastassja Martin 1681375850 Adam 0 to-read 3.94 2019 In the Eye of the Wild
author: Nastassja Martin
name: Adam
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood (Glas, 21)]]> 1060509 The South Side is a quietly powerful story of how a white, middle-class, and largely Jewish neighborhood, built from prairie on Chicago's far South Side in the optimistic years after World War II, rapidly and dramatically changed to a middle-class black community in the 1960s. It is a tale of two communities that collided almost by accident at a moment in America's history when race relations were starting to explode, and the profound impact this wrenching collision had on the lives of families and individuals on both sides of the event; a tale of how dreams were both realized and shattered in the confrontation between moral courage, spiritual ethics, and personal fears. The story is told in memoir and oral narrative by fifteen composite characters--two generations of former and current residents of the community, both Jewish and African American. Louis Rosen has made nothing up: the memories, thoughts, and feelings of the characters reflect exactly what was spoken during his extensive interviews. The names are fictional, but The South Side is essentially a work of nonfiction. It speaks to universal concerns: what it is like to grow up as part of a group that is outside the mainstream of American life; why the search for home is so difficult in late-twentieth-century America. The South Side is a story without obvious heroes or villains. It transcends the boundaries of specific individuals, place, and time to offer a vivid description of a struggle that is still very much a part of American life, and one that is likely to be with us for some time to come.]]> 189 Louis Rosen 1566632749 Adam 0 2024, research 3.86 1998 The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood (Glas, 21)
author: Louis Rosen
name: Adam
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: 2024, research
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Prime Minister of Paradise: Christian Gottlieb Priber and the Search for the Lost American Enlightenment]]> 26254946 Sewanee Review, John Jeremiah Sullivan came across an article entitled ‘Lost Utopia of the American Frontier� and was immediately hooked on the dramatic story of a lost book, an alternative history of the South, a white Indian. It was a story he’d chase for the next two decades.

In 1735, a charismatic German lawyer and accused atheist named Christian Gottlieb Priber fled Germany under threat of arrest, bound for colonial South Carolina. In the Cherokee village of Grand Tellico, he created a Utopian society that he named Paradise.

For six years, Paradise was governed by a set of revolutionary ideas that included racial equality, sexual freedom, and a lack of private property, ideas which he chronicled in a mysterious manuscript he called Paradise.

Priber’s ideas were so subversive that he was hunted for half a decade and eventually captured by the British � making headlines across the world � and imprisoned until his death. The only copy of Paradise was apparently destroyed.

Now, in a rare combination of ground-breaking research and stunning narrative skill, award-winning writer John Jeremiah Sullivan brings that lost history vividly to life.]]> 368 John Jeremiah Sullivan 0224098144 Adam 0 to-read 0.0 2024 The Prime Minister of Paradise: Christian Gottlieb Priber and the Search for the Lost American Enlightenment
author: John Jeremiah Sullivan
name: Adam
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Satantango 17574845
The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,� George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.�

“You know,� Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”]]> 288 László Krasznahorkai 0811220893 Adam 4 that-s-what-she-read, 2024 4.29 1985 Satantango
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Adam
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves: that-s-what-she-read, 2024
review:

]]> Pearl 122758113
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?]]> 220 Siân Hughes 1911648527 Adam 0 to-read 3.79 2023 Pearl
author: Siân Hughes
name: Adam
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Library)]]> 3123182 A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.

Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever.The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun."

"The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun," said The New York Times."It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic."This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.]]> 135 Lorraine Hansberry 0679601724 Adam 4 research, 2024 4.13 1959 A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Library)
author: Lorraine Hansberry
name: Adam
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves: research, 2024
review:
“And these here Chicago peckerwoods is some baaaaad peckerwoods.
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