en-US Sat, 03 May 2025 20:49:30 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 34473 56 Jun'ichirĹŤ Tanizaki E 0 2025 4.06 1933
author: Jun'ichirĹŤ Tanizaki
name: E
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 220270817 For fans of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, this is the real-life story of Celia and Mamaine “devoted twins, whose lives and loves traversed the intellectual currents and crises of mid-twentieth century Europe� (Rupert Christiansen).


After the prominent London literary socialite Celia Goodman née Paget died in 2002, her daughter, Ariane Bankes, inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries that belonged to Celia and her identical twin sister, Mamaine. This correspondence charted two remarkable lives spent amongst a remarkable cast of characters who were at the heart of their age, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and George Orwell.


Throughout a secluded childhood in the country with their widowed father, boarding school, and Swiss finishing school, they remained inseparable. As debutantes, they took 1930s London by storm, rejecting conventional suitors in favor of life together amongst the city’s bohemian intelligentsia. During the war and after, they were at the side of Europe’s foremost intellectuals—as coworkers, close friends, and lovers.


This captivating memoir is an intimate portrait of a lost age and the male thinkers who dominated it, as seen through women’s eyes. Above all, it’s the tale of two devoted sisters, remarkable women both.

]]> 297 Ariane Bankes 1961341360 E 0 to-read 3.67
author: Ariane Bankes
name: E
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 E 0 2025 4.60 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: E
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: 2025
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]]> 61685822 From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.

In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.]]> 257 Claire Dederer 0525655115 E 0 to-read 3.75 2023
author: Claire Dederer
name: E
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214988449 A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.

"One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin’s twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak.]]> 136 Vincenzo Latronico 1681378728 E 0 to-read 3.81 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: E
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 127282246
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 1644452839 E 0 2025 3.86 2024
author: Nicolette Polek
name: E
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 222437856 'I don’t need LSD for things to look pretty.'

Ellen is an artist living alone on New York in the 1970s. She is beset by irritating ex-boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances' � episodes of joyous, reckless unreality during which she becomes Princess Esmerelda, a brightly-dressed star ruling over her kingdom of West 72nd Street. Yet there are those around her, particularly the men in her life, who are threatened by this incarnation, and wish to curtail the giddy freedom it brings her. A rhapsodic work of exuberant invention and deadpan humour, The Princess of 72nd Street sees female liberation and mental health through new eyes.]]> 160 Elaine Kraf 024171527X E 0 3.85 1979
author: Elaine Kraf
name: E
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read, beautiful-covers, wishlist
review:

]]> 220436781 Finalist, National Book Award for Translated Literature
Winner, Dutch Literature Prize
Winner, P. C. Hooft Award

“Roemer makes her English-language debut with this classic of queer Black literature� As Roemer pushes at the boundaries of the senses, she melds biting postcolonial social commentary with a lush dreamscape. Scott’s translation is a gift to English-language readers.� —Publishers Weekly

On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.

Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,� she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”]]> 284 Astrid H. Roemer 1917126077 E 0 to-read, mad-women, book-club 2.83 1982
author: Astrid H. Roemer
name: E
average rating: 2.83
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read, mad-women, book-club
review:

]]> 49455 Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.]]> 136 Fyodor Dostoevsky 067973452X E 0 currently-reading 4.21 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: E
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1864
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 74425101 In the tradition of Katy Tur, Jane Pauley, and Peter Jennings, Chai Jing shows us the power of television news and the complex challenges of reporting in China.After becoming a radio DJ in college and a TV interviewer at 23, Chai Jing is thrust into the spotlight when she takes on a position as a news anchor at CCTV, China’s official state news channel. Chai struggles to find her role in a male-dominated news organization, discovering corruption, courage, and hope within the people she meets while honing her talent for getting people to reveal themselves to her.In eleven propulsive and deeply felt chapters, Chai recounts her investigations into SARS quarantine wards, a childhood suicide epidemic, the human cost of industrial pollution, and organized crime, while looking back at her growth as a journalist. Chai Jing shares the philosophical and emotional complexity of the ethical challenges that are always present in such revealing reporting, while she also finds hope and purpose, time and again, in the vital and intimate stories of her interviewees.This candid memoir from one of China’s best-known journalists provides a rare window into the issues which concern us most, and which face contemporary China and the whole world.]]> 289 Chai Jing 1662600682 E 0 to-read, chinese, wishlist 5.00 2013
author: Chai Jing
name: E
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read, chinese, wishlist
review:

]]> 51541496
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.]]> 227 Raven Leilani 0374194327 E 0 kaia, currently-reading 3.51 2020
author: Raven Leilani
name: E
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: kaia, currently-reading
review:

]]> 726146 248 Elizabeth David 1590170040 E 0 to-read 4.17 1955
author: Elizabeth David
name: E
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51542651 From Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, comes the beguiling travelogue of a woman in exile: from her past, her ghosts, and herself.

A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She’s been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn’t changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clichés invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home.

Urgent and immersive, filled with black humour and desire, McBride’s Strange Hotel is a novel of enduring emotional force.]]> 160 Eimear McBride 0374270627 E 0 to-read, book-club 3.28 2020
author: Eimear McBride
name: E
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, book-club
review:

]]> 61053935 A compelling debut novel about an ambitious woman who, after a lifetime of conning alongside her mother, wants to leave her dark past behind and marry the heir to one of the country's wealthiest families.

Like any enterprising woman, Bea knows what she’s worth and is determined to get all she deserves—it just so happens that what she deserves is to marry rich. After a lifetime of forced instruction in the art of swindling men by her mother, Bea wants nothing more than to escape her shadow, close the door on their sordid past, and disappear safely into old-money domesticity.

When Bea finds her final mark in the perfectly dull blue-blooded Collin, she’s ready to deploy all her tricks one last time. The challenge isn’t getting the ring, but rather the approval of Collin’s family and everyone else in their tax bracket, particularly his childhood best friend Gale. Going toe-to-toe with Gale isn’t a threat to an expert like Bea, but what begins as an amusing cat-and-mouse game quickly develops into a dangerous chase. As the truth of Bea’s past threatens to come roaring out, she finds herself racing against the clock to pass the finish line before everything is exposed.]]> 353 Rachel Koller Croft 0593547500 E 0 to-read, mad-women, book-club 3.63 2023
author: Rachel Koller Croft
name: E
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, mad-women, book-club
review:

]]> 223590503
Hanif Kureishi on the Art of Fiction: “When I was in hospital in Rome, having the experience of being a paralyzed man nearly dead, my only excitement was in the thought that I could write some of this shit down.�

Gerald Murnane on the Art of Fiction: “A fatal question—what are people reading these days? Never mind what people are reading these days. What should I be writing about is the fundamental question.�

Prose by Dan Bevacqua, Caoilinn Hughes, Silas Jones, Alec Niedenthal, Adania Shibli, and Abdulah Sidran.

Poetry by Sargon Boulus, Egill SkallagrĂ­msson, Rachel Mannheimer, Simone White, and Hua Xi.

Art by Ann Craven, Ala Ebtekar, and Josh Smith; cover by Seth Becker.]]> 242 Emily Stokes E 0 paris-review, gifted, 2024 3.40
author: Emily Stokes
name: E
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: paris-review, gifted, 2024
review:

]]> 68134144 Book by Audrey Thomas 220 Audrey Thomas 0889220638 E 0 to-read 3.00 1992
author: Audrey Thomas
name: E
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1927032 Book by Ades, Dawn 128 Dawn Ades 0500410518 E 0 2025 3.38 1974
author: Dawn Ades
name: E
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 942361 Book by Corbett, William William Corbett 0944072070 E 0 2025, poetry 3.00 1989
author: William Corbett
name: E
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025, poetry
review:

]]> 1707276 346 William Corbett 1555972721 E 0 to-read 3.62 1998
author: William Corbett
name: E
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1308668
Now the acclaimed novelist, biographer, critic and screenwriter Gavin Lambert, whose twenty-year friendship with Natalie Wood began when she wanted to star in the movie adaptation of his novel Inside Daisy Clover, tells her extraordinary story. He writes about her parents, uncovering secrets that Natalie either didn’t know or kept hidden from those closest to her. Here is the young Natalie, from her years as a child actress at the mercy of a driven, controlling stage mother (“Make Mr. Pichel love you,� she whispered to the five-year-old Natalie before depositing her unexpectedly on the director’s lap), to her awkward adolescence when, suddenly too old for kiddie roles, she was shunted aside, just another freshman at Van Nuys High. Lambert shows us the glamorous movie star in her twenties� All the Fine Young Cannibals, Gypsy and Love with the Proper Stranger . He writes about her marriages, her divorces, her love affairs, her suicide attempt at twenty-six, the birth of her children, her friendships, her struggles as an actress and her tragic death by drowning (she was always terrified of water) at forty-three.
For the first time, everyone who knew Natalie Wood speaks freely–including her husbands Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson, famously private people like Warren Beatty, intimate friends such as playwright Mart Crowley, directors Robert Mulligan and Paul Mazursky, and Leslie Caron, each of whom told the author stories about this remarkable woman who was both life-loving and filled with despair.

What we couldn’t know–have never been told before–Lambert perceptively uncovers. His book provides the richest portrait we have had of Natalie Wood.]]> 384 Gavin Lambert 0375410740 E 0 to-read 3.55 2004
author: Gavin Lambert
name: E
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59441857
"The bisexual draft dodger living on the skids, the glamorous young widow in search of enlightenment, the skinny gamine from out of town who wants to make it in the movies . . ."* These are the people who inhabit Gavin Lambert's mordant portrait of Southern California at the end of the 1960 forever swapping addresses, lovers, and dreams. They live in extraordinary, suffocating wealth; or else flirting with a Mansonesque cult; or else in a fantasy where golden-age actresses make ghostly visitations to comment on their daily life. All that binds them together is their common sense of aimlessness--and the clear, judgment-free eye of a British author trying his best to be a friend to each.

Cool, incisive, yet essentially kind, and very much ahead of its time, The Goodby People unfolds "in the yawning chasm between real life in Los Angeles and the fantasies manufactured by its dominant business" (*Gary Indiana), and stands as Gavin Lambert's masterpiece.]]> 217 Gavin Lambert 1946022446 E 0 to-read 3.85 1971
author: Gavin Lambert
name: E
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216247514 From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from us

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation?Ěý

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with this question. In 2021, she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines, forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal�s first Facebook reporter, to testing early versions of ChatGPT—all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech’s incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.]]> 352 Vauhini Vara 0593701526 E 0 gifted, ex-machina 3.94 2025
author: Vauhini Vara
name: E
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: gifted, ex-machina
review:

]]> 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna E 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: E
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45688207
Damion Searls’s new translation brings out the power and nuance of these celebrated lectures. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction describes their historical and biographical background, reception, and influence. Weber’s effort to rethink the idea of a public calling at the start of the tumultuous twentieth century is revealed to be as timely and stirring as ever.]]> 176 Max Weber 1681373890 E 0 currently-reading 3.98 1919
author: Max Weber
name: E
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1919
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 195431637 A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK � The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood, a legacy erased from history—until now.

“This is the kind of history I wish I learned as a child dreaming of the stage!� —Misty Copeland, author of Black My Journey to Our Legacy

“Utterly absorbing, flawlessly-researched…Vibrant, propulsive, and inspiring, The Swans of Harlem is a richly drawn portrait of five courageous women whose contributions have been silenced for too long!� —Tia Williams, author of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other’s chosen family. She was the first Black company ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star; she was cast in The Wiz and in a Bob Fosse production on Broadway. She performed in some of ballet’s most iconic works with other trailblazing ballerinas, including the young women who became her closest friends—founding Dance Theatre of Harlem members Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan, as well as first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells.

These Swans of Harlem performed for the Queen of England, Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder, on the same bill as Josephine Baker, at the White House, and beyond. But decades later there was almost no record of their groundbreaking history to be found. Out of a sisterhood that had grown even deeper with the years, these Swans joined forces again—to share their story with the world.

Captivating, rich in vivid detail and character, and steeped in the glamour and grit of professional ballet, The Swans of Harlem is a riveting account of five extraordinarily accomplished women, a celebration of both their historic careers and the sustaining, grounding power of female friendship, and a window into the robust history of Black ballet, hidden for too long.]]> 421 Karen Valby 059331753X E 0 gifted, 2025 4.27 2024
author: Karen Valby
name: E
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: gifted, 2025
review:

]]> 8728141 624 Norman Palmer 9041106677 E 0 to-read 0.0 1997
author: Norman Palmer
name: E
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1546482
For film to have a devotional quality both absolute and relative time must be active and present not only present but functioning simultaneously and invigorating one another. Transformative film rests in the present and respects the delicate details of its own unfolding."]]> 54 Nathaniel Dorsky 1931157065 E 5 2025, favorites, twenties 4.29 2003
author: Nathaniel Dorsky
name: E
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: 2025, favorites, twenties
review:

]]> 3964623 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 221 James Baldwin E 0 gifted, to-read 4.01 1953
author: James Baldwin
name: E
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: gifted, to-read
review:

]]> 213815358 20 Albert Camus 1916809855 E 0 2025 4.06
author: Albert Camus
name: E
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 85795337
The affairs of Babylon are dictated by a lottery. Discreetly administered by a mysterious and seemingly omnipotent Company, the lottery can elevate citizens to positions of wealth and power or condemn them to the most shameful punishments. Taking this fantastical conceit as its starting point, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story is a characteristically brilliant achievement � a haunting mediation on the nature of chance, paranoia and divinity.]]> 20 Jorge Luis Borges 1912475960 E 0 2025 4.18 1941
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: E
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 60758181 Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.

A countess with a card trick; love letters filled with deception; a desperate man with a pistol. The Queen of Spades, one of Pushkin's most popular and chilling stories, is accompanied here by the thrilling Dubrovsky and unforgettable Tales of Belkin.]]> 259 Alexander Pushkin 0241573769 E 0 to-read, russian-lit 3.90 1834
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: E
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1834
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read, russian-lit
review:

]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 AysegĂĽl Savas 163973306X E 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: AysegĂĽl Savas
name: E
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61443719 Little Clothbound irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. This selection includes among others 'The Standard of Living', 'Mr Durant' and her masterpiece, 'Big Blonde'.'She has fascinated generations with her wit, flair and talent' The New York Review of Books]]> 152 Dorothy Parker 0241609933 E 0 to-read 3.71 1929
author: Dorothy Parker
name: E
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18273 256 Friedrich Nietzsche 0394703375 E 0 theory, modernism, 2025 3.87 1886
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: E
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1886
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: theory, modernism, 2025
review:

]]> 125098630 A compelling celebration of the power of the essay, this collection of 47 writings offers a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Montaigne as he reflects on the miscellany of daily life—movies and art, friends and family—over the course of a single year.

The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, the resistible rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be.]]> 201 Phillip Lopate 1681377799 E 0 2025 3.66
author: Phillip Lopate
name: E
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 6628532
Writers at Work: Interviews on the Art of Fiction with Lorrie Moore and Rick Moody.

Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Cunningham, Dave Eggers, Richard Ford, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, and Joanna Scott on acceptance and rejection.

Stories by Adam Johnson, Ian McGuire, and Maile Meloy. Poems by Monica Ferrell, Dave King, Jeremy Glazier, Thomas Healy, and Richard Matthews.]]> George Plimpton E 0 2025 4.50
author: George Plimpton
name: E
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 1080091
***Not all versions of the item contain an interview between Schrader and Martin Scorsese.***]]> 116 Paul Schrader 0571144640 E 0 2025, film 4.38 1975
author: Paul Schrader
name: E
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: 2025, film
review:

]]> 11633 256 Sylvia Plath 0375404643 E 0 2025, poetry this did a number on me 4.27 1981
author: Sylvia Plath
name: E
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: 2025, poetry
review:
this did a number on me
]]> 95821347 272 Martin Heidegger E 0 to-read 5.00 1952
author: Martin Heidegger
name: E
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 134119018 A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.� Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.]]> 290 Kyle Chayka E 0 to-read 3.65 2024
author: Kyle Chayka
name: E
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60592923 why are we still shopping?
As a former fashion editor for streetwear
publication Highsnobiety and the founder of
sustainable fashion platform @future__dust,
I feel like I'm in a good place to figure that out.
I wrote this book to explain why we love to
shop so much, how fashion keeps us hungry
for more, and the tricks it plays to cover up
its true impact on the planet.
It's a journey touching on consumerism,
sneaker hype, greenwashing, Karl Marx,
mindfulness and everything in between.
The result is a manifesto for a slower, more
intentional approach to fashion, one that
redefines what shopping is - and what it isn't.]]> 144 Alec Leach E 4 2025 4.15
author: Alec Leach
name: E
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 213458857
This is the night Shera's been waiting for: She’s at a trendy Silver Lake bar to finally get a drink with the handsome, charming filmmaker she's been pining after for months.

But when Max King—the alluring and mischievous frontman of an Irish punk band—enters the picture, an electric attraction ignites between them.

Shera’s evening begins to unfold in ways she never imagined, and she surprises herself by getting swept up in his energy and daring to feel again after past heartbreak. But how does she know their passionate encounter won't expire in the morning? And is she ready to shed some of her hard-earned armor for this disarming stranger?]]> 160 A.C. Robinson E 3 2025 3.40
author: A.C. Robinson
name: E
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 60065627 A Room of One’s Own and William H. Gass’s On Being Blue.

“Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?�

A series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, A Horse at Night: On Writing moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book is an individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.]]> 136 Amina Cain 1948980134 E 4 2025 4.05 2022
author: Amina Cain
name: E
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 16136805
In these poems that riff on A. Van Jordan’s life as a moviegoer, film serves as the setting for reverie, memoir, and pure fantasy. At the center is a sonnet sequence that imagines the struggle of pioneer filmmaker Oscar Micheaux against D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which Micheaux saw not only as racist but also as the start of a powerful new art form.
from “Last Year at Marienbad�

A place, though visible, is like a ghost
of memories. Even memories one forgets
linger in the space in which they occurred.
Here within the expanse of vaulted ceilings,

doorways leading to more doors, hallways
leading to more halls, the faintest recollections
absorb over time; no act will wholly evanesce.]]> 160 A. Van Jordan 0393239152 E 0 2025 3.70 2013
author: A. Van Jordan
name: E
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 58687126
This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.

As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be . . . you.

Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.]]> 304 Viola Davis 0063037327 E 0 to-read 4.54 2022
author: Viola Davis
name: E
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 157455 88 James Baldwin 3125765005 E 0 to-read 4.32 1957
author: James Baldwin
name: E
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X E 0 to-read 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: E
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59381681
The Book of the Season is MIDDLEMARCH: A STUDY OF PROVINCIAL LIFE by Mary Ann Evans who, for reasons of societal sexism, wrote under the pen name George Eliot. This sprawling English novel tends to be accompanied by phrases like �but it’s just so long� from those who haven’t read it, and �the best novel in the English language� from those who have. Contributors include: Rebecca Mead, Rob Palk, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Deborah Friedell, Jordana Brewster, Yelena Moskovich and Tara Isabella Burton.]]> 64 Various 0241539854 E 0 to-read 3.69
author: Various
name: E
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59627002
The concept of the magazine is simple: the first half is a long-form interview with a notable book fanatic and the second half explores one classic work of literature from an array of surprising and invigorating angles.]]> 64 Various 0241568935 E 0 to-read 4.39
author: Various
name: E
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61605373
The Book of the Season is THE ODYSSEY, a singable story of heroes and gods inhabiting the world’s first archipelago and the perfect read for slow summer journeys, outbound or inbound. Contributors include: Justin E. H. Smith, Rebecca May Johnson, Nicholas Jubber, Eliot Haworth, Jeremy Lewis, Sabine Mirlesse and Rob Doyle.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241618576 E 0 to-read 4.53
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56018861
Our Book of the Season is Sabahattin Ali’s breathtaking romance, MADONNA IN A FUR COAT. Published to indifference in the early �40s it’s become one of the biggest literary blockbusters in Turkey in recent years � and the question of how and why it went from underground legend to mass-market hit is intriguing, just like the layered narratives of the novel itself. Contributors include: Elif Shafak, Julie Verhoeven, Liz Johnson Artur, Rob Doyle, Richard Godwin, and Kaya Genç.]]> 68 Penguin Classics 0241444535 E 0 to-read 4.14
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53369408
Our Book of the Season, JAPANESE GHOST STORIES, is centre of gravity to a series of hallucinatory artworks; correspondents around the world compile an obsessive yet fragmentary portrait of the book’s odd author, Lafcadio Hearn. Contributors include Lieko Shiga, John Self, Travis Elborough, Bess Lovejoy and Moeko Fujii.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241444527 E 0 to-read 4.15
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49349760
The Book of the Season this winter is Joris-Karl Huysmans� AGAINST NATURE (1884), perhaps the most decadent novel ever written. Its relentless inventory-keeping thrills and inspires some readers and baffles others, and is highly relevant to this season of non-stop accumulation. Contributors include Jarvis Cocker, Lydia Davis, Rob Doyle and Jeanette Winterson.]]> 66 Penguin Classics 0241391652 E 0 to-read 3.62 2019
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43197483
FRANKENSTEIN by MARY SHELLEY was published exactly two hundred years ago. Two archetypes � the manmade monster and the mad scientist who created him � have been loping around in the collective unconscious ever since. To honour this incredible act of literary invention, part two of this issue presents a sequence of monsters, as fed through various prisms of association, and emerging as everything from chatbots to man bags. Contributors include GEOFF DYER, JEFFREY LEWIS, JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN and JUSTIN E. H. SMITH.]]> 66 Penguin Classics 0241355281 E 0 to-read 3.91 2018
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40571187
OLLY ALEXANDER, lead vocalist with British pop group YEARS & YEARS opens up about being young, gay and famous, explains a key literary reference in a new song, and namechecks, among others, James Baldwin, Andrew Holleran and Flannery O’Connor.

The articles that follow strive to unlock the meaning of THE BLACK TULIP, an unputdownable novel set in the Dutch Golden Age, with contributions from DEBORAH LEVY, RICHARD BENSON, CHARLIE CONNELLY and NEAL FOX.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241355273 E 0 to-read 4.04
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29777040
Also in this issue, VIRGINIA WOOLF’s remarkable novel MRS DALLOWAY inspires contributions from a stellar cast of writers, photographers, artists and crossword setters. These include thoughts on Big Ben by Will Self, memories of teenage reading by Michael Cunningham, regrets about men not wedded by Jean Hannah Edelstein and, of course, much, much more.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241279321 E 0 to-read 4.26
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29534507
Meanwhile in Sweden, The Saga of Gösta Berling by the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf has for over a century held a special place in the national psyche as well as abroad. In this issue, her wicked novel sends us off on an expedition through Swedish life, nature, food and much more.]]> 62 Penguin Classics 0241279305 E 0 to-read 4.40
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28105818 62 Penguin Classics 0241203015 E 0 to-read 4.39
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 35285090
In part two, a pretend-perfect society is ruthlessly satirised in YEVGENY ZAMYATIN’s early sci-fi novel WE. The book inspires an interview with MARIA ALYOKHINA from dissident punk band PUSSY RIOT plus writings on state-controlled love lives, patriotic poetry, weather manipulation and cosmic links between Russia and California, with contributors including WILL SELF, NICHOLAS LEZARD, RICHARD GODWIN and HARRIET ALIDA LYE.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241318157 E 0 to-read 3.92
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26079847 62 Penguin Classics 024120299X E 0 to-read 4.13 2015
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29776955
Then, after our new best friend provides us a list of recommended reads, the issue travels west and then west some more, with Willa Cather’s O PIONEERS!, a bittersweet novel that evokes the fearful glory of the American frontier. Horseback preachers, prairie chickens, and pickled gherkins all make brief appearances in our special Nebraska-tinged section, with contributions from notable Great Plains-based writers Amanda Fortini and Clancy Martin, the comic book artist Dash Shaw, and many others besides.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241279348 E 0 to-read 4.17 2016
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 27235228 62 Penguin Classics 0241203007 E 0 to-read 4.27 2015
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 31548236
Next, the issue sails off to TREASURE ISLAND by the towering master of the nineteenth-century page-turner, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. This somewhat boyish yet universally cherished tale gives rise to curious news from the parrot world, a conversation with a singalong genius, and in-depth reportage examining the worldwide electoral surge of pirate political parties.]]> 64 Penguin Classics 0241279364 E 0 to-read 4.03
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49767255
Our Book of the Season for summer is an eternal bestseller by the Stoic philosopher, imperial life coach and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The book is his secret diary that everyone is reading, the Meditations. With contributions from writers including Geoff Dyer and Deborah Levy and the photographer Martin Parr, the second half of the magazine tells you all you may ever need to know about nature, exercise, philosophy and love.]]> 66 Penguin Classics 0241391644 E 0 to-read 4.22 2019
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25186587 62 Penguin Classics 0241202981 E 0 to-read 4.31 2015
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24448233 62 Penguin Classics 0241196507 E 0 to-read 4.39 2014
author: Penguin Classics
name: E
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217920499
Hasan is a young journalist in Dhaka, disillusioned about his job, dissatisfied with his pregnant wife, and yearning for his independent-minded colleague, Bilu. One fateful night, he stumbles into a hapless, embarrassing situation that turns his life upside down. At the mercy of an unforgiving society for a crime he did not commit, Hasan is haunted anew by memories of other victims of injustice he has known. Meanwhile, Bilu struggles too against insidious forms of patriarchal expectations and control that hold her back from expressing her full self.

Told in a meandering, poetic voice, Memorial Club immerses us in the worlds of Hasan and Bilu, creating a vivid, complex portrait of Bangladeshi society. The novel takes a hard look at social ills such as gender discrimination, class frictions, and sexual assault. Yet it is at times also nostalgic and lyrical, bearing us from the crowded streets of the capital city to the luminous mustard fields of Hasan's childhood village, while invoking the lessons of the Mahabharata and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Written by one of Bangladesh's most reputed writers, this novel is an intoxicating meditation on desire, dreams, and the limits of justice.]]> 138 Mozid Mahmud 1958652164 E 0 to-read 3.00
author: Mozid Mahmud
name: E
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209654455 196 Fuel 1739887867 E 0 2025 4.25
author: Fuel
name: E
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 24832260 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined literature. A startling tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and virtuoso style have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Will Self, as well as on music, film, and the media generally. This restored edition incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote about the book, and an appendix of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a definitive and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs E 0 3.28 1959
author: William S. Burroughs
name: E
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/30
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: camille, postmodern, 2022, beats, classics
review:
frankly it's the Beats that make me fear men's minds the most.
]]> 208433116 The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression.

Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight.

Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.

Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.]]> 192 Izumi Suzuki 180429330X E 0 2024 3.37 1983
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: E
average rating: 3.37
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 205478800 Raised with hoarding and compulsive shopping, Emily Mester is caught in between. What happens when consumption begins to consume you back?

In a series of deeply personal essays, Mester explores how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. With humor and sharp intellect, Mester reflects on the joys and anxieties of Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get “mall sad.� In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family’s obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces readers to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.]]> 240 Emily Mester 1324035234 E 4 3.86 2024
author: Emily Mester
name: E
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: gifted, top-50, twenties, 2025
review:

]]> 62919750
Using the myth of Eurydice as a structure, this riveting science fiction novel is set in a near-future London where it has become popular for folks to have a small implant that allows one access to a more robust social media experience directly as an augmented reality. However, the British government has taken oversight of this access to an extreme, slowly tilting towards a dystopian overreach, all in the name of safety.]]> 592 Temi Oh 1982142839 E 0 to-read 3.63 2023
author: Temi Oh
name: E
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 E 0 to-read 3.80 2022
author: Nadia Terranova
name: E
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207298207 Dorothy Parker’s complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigors of reviewing.


When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rupic “Constant Reader,� she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell—does�), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness�), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word �hummy,� my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up�).


Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post]]> 224 Dorothy Parker 1961341255 E 0 2024, best-titles 4.18
author: Dorothy Parker
name: E
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: 2024, best-titles
review:

]]> 10863977

Girl, 20 is a merciless send-up of 1970s London's permissive society, from a master of uproarious comedy.]]> 218 Kingsley Amis 0141194243 E 0 to-read 3.40 1971
author: Kingsley Amis
name: E
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211287653 Read the pageturning Korean feminist thriller for fans of KIM JIYOUNG BORN 1982 and CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN � soon to be a major Netflix Original TV Series starring Gong Yoo from SQUID GAMES and Seo Hyun-jin

Meet Noh thirty years old, with five wedding rings so far, and she’s never once been in love.

When Inji takes a job at Wedding & Life, the popular matchmaking service, she never imagines role will be with NM, their secretive marriage division that rents out �field husbands and wives� to their wealthiest clientele for a limited time. Just like a real marriage, Inji's assignments involve a wedding, some sex and a bit of housework, there is even a special helpline in case of any DV. It's all tailored exactly to the client’s desires - no legal battles, no fights, no emotional baggage.

In no way is Inji interested in finding real love, despite everyone trying to convince her otherwise- her brazen neighbour Granny, her flirtatious best friend Shi-jeong, and her failed blind date, Tae-seong.

Then one of Inji's old husbands, a mysterious high-profile music producer, requests her back for another year. Soon Inji’s own dark past will begin to unravel � as well as the sinister underbelly of the NM’s management team, who will stop at nothing to preserve their reputation - and that of their clients.]]> 304 Kim Ryeo-ryeong 1335015019 E 0 to-read 2.87 2015
author: Kim Ryeo-ryeong
name: E
average rating: 2.87
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 E 0 2024 4.37 2021
author: John Green
name: E
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 200307455
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a short­cut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her.

A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.

With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloe Caldwell writes the story of a love in of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the feverish obsession of addictive love, and asks the what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?

In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women is an incandescent novella that brands the heart and sears the soul.]]> 160 Chloé Caldwell 0063387077 E 0 to-read 4.01 2014
author: Chloé Caldwell
name: E
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1257848 Cholo Style includes interviews and photographs obtained at great risk from gang members and underworld leaders throughout the state of California, plus intense, stylized line drawings from barrios, prisons, and low-rider cultural gatherings.
With over 150 photographs, illustrations, and letters, the sharply designed Cholo Style presents the fast-expanding Chicano barrio culture from its most authentic and street-credible perspective.]]> 239 Reynaldo Berrios 1932595147 E 0 to-read 3.95 2006
author: Reynaldo Berrios
name: E
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204753751 Reading the Room is Paul Yamazaki's love letter to the work of bookselling and an engaged life of the mind.



Over twenty-four hours, Paul Yamazaki leads us through the stacks of storied City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco; the care and prowess of his approach to book buying; his upbringing in a Japanese American family in Southern California and moving to San Francisco at the height of revolutionary foment; working with legendary figures in the book publishing industry like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sonny Mehta, and others; and his vision for the future of bookselling. Navigating building trust with readers and nurturing relationships across the literary industry, Yamazaki testifies to the value of generosity, sharing knowledge, and dialogue in a life devoted to books.]]> 100 Paul Yamazaki 1958846694 E 0 to-read 4.17 2024
author: Paul Yamazaki
name: E
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 103516977
Personal stylist Allison Bornstein has mastered the art of helping people look good and feel good. In Wear It Well , she shares her philosophy and outlines systems that will bring your style into alignment and create a wardrobe that delights your spirit and reflects your most authentic self.

Use the viral Three-Word Method to discover and define your personal style. Curate your closet with the AB Closet-Editing System, eliminating items that don’t fit or work for your lifestyle to build a safe and inspiring space that is filled with only clothes that bring you joy, confidence, and empowerment. Create new, sustainable looks by shopping your closet and mixing and matching with the Nine Universal Pieces.

Filled with client stories, gentle guidance, and expressive photography, Wear It Well will inspire you to identify, articulate, and develop your personal style, and dress with ease.

UNIQUE BLEND OF WELLNESS, SELF-CARE, AND The only "Joy of Dressing" book there no other book merges fashion, wellness, and self-care. In a time when many of us are at home or beginning to venture back out professionally or socially, this book will help take away the stress and anxiety around dressing. It is also a refreshing take on self-care that can easily be added to morning routines.

A PROVEN The AB Closet Editing System and Three Word Method are simple ways to organize your closet and your mind that Bornstein has successfully used with hundreds of clients.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BODY Wear It Well discusses how to combat and banish the voices of shame that permeate fashion culture and our own heads when we buy clothing. Thi s will appeal to readers passionate about body positivity, and fans of The Body Is Not An Apology , Body Talk , and More Than A Body .

PROMOTES SUSTAINABLE Bornstein's program is based on shopping our closets rather than going out to buy an all-new wardrobe. She demonstrates how to choose ten versatile pieces to mix and match within our wardrobe . She also encourages readers to donate "never going to wear" clothes and to dress intentionally.

Perfect ]]> 224 Allison Bornstein 1797221426 E 0 2024 3.93 2023
author: Allison Bornstein
name: E
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 221517805
Javier Cercas on the Art of Fiction: “Hell, to me, is a literary party.�

James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.�

Prose by Josephine Baker, Caleb Crain, Marlene Morgan, Morgan Thomas, and Fumio Yamamoto.

Poetry by Hannah Arendt, Matt Broaddus, Sara Gilmore, Benjamin Krusling, Mark Leidner, James Richardson, and Margaret Ross.

Art by Ayé Aton and Ron Veasey, and cover by Sterling Ruby.]]> 259 Emily Stokes E 0 2024, gifted 3.84
author: Emily Stokes
name: E
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: 2024, gifted
review:

]]> 61764259
Annette Gordon-Reed on the Art of Nonfiction: “We law professors have a certain arrogance� we think we can be experts on anything.�

Prose by Annie Baker, Chetna Maroo, Emmanuel Carrère, and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.

Poetry by Tove Ditlevsen, Terrance Hayes, Ben Lerner, Sally Wen Mao, Eugenio Montale, Sharon Olds, and Kathleen Ossip.

Art by Leilah Babirye and Scott Covert.

Cover by Rose Wylie.]]> Emily Stokes E 0 3.86 2021
author: Emily Stokes
name: E
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/02/03
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: 2022, beautiful-covers, paris-review
review:

]]> 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 E 0 to-read 3.62 2007
author: Han Kang
name: E
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 E 0 2024 3.30 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: E
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 821245 Prufrock and Other Observations are the following poems:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Portrait of a Lady
Preludes
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Morning at the Window
The Boston Evening Transcript
Aunt Helen
Cousin Nancy
Mr. Apollinax
Hysteria
Conversation Galante
La Figlia Che Piange]]> 48 T.S. Eliot 0571207200 E 5 academic, poetry 4.16 1915
author: T.S. Eliot
name: E
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/07
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: academic, poetry
review:

]]> 9939002 256 Samuel Butler E 0 to-read 3.00 1872
author: Samuel Butler
name: E
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1872
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202100087 224 Jean Cocteau E 0 2024 4.33
author: Jean Cocteau
name: E
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 59936797

Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating “atmosphere of nameless dread� (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations, at last we see how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.]]> 1024 Patricia Highsmith 1474617603 E 0 to-read, orion 4.20
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: E
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read, orion
review:

]]> 33164893 108 Pierre Bergé 9954361278 E 0 orion, 2024 4.11 2010
author: Pierre Bergé
name: E
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: orion, 2024
review:

]]> 45032 488 Jane Austen E 0 3.86 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: E
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read, classics, romanticism
review:

]]> 11525175 Ěý
El artista, arquitecto, comisario, editor, poeta y urbanista chino Ai Weiwei ha ampliado con su polifacética obra la noción tradicional de arte y se ha convertido en uno de los personajes más significativos del panorama creativo y cultural internacional. En esta serie de entrevistas mantenidas con el comisario Hans Ulrich Obrist a lo largo de varios años, Ai Weiwei desvela el sinfín de influencias que han nutrido su obra y reflexiona sobre las múltiples dimensiones con las que se ha configurado su vida artística, desde la cerámica o los blogs, hasta la naturaleza, la filosofía o su faceta más conocida como activista político contra el gobierno de China. Un pequeño volumen de conversaciones extraordinarias que arrojan excepcional luz sobre la complejidad de la obra y el pensamiento de Ai Weiwei y se convierten, al mismo tiempo, en recordatorio crucial de la necesidad de libertad personal, política y artística de esta figura clave de la escena artística contemporánea.
Ěý]]> 128 Weiwei Ai 0241957540 E 0 2024 3.57 2011
author: Weiwei Ai
name: E
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 37638061 The book tells the story of a man who relied on his instincts and unique vision to chart his own course. In doing so, Lauren laid the groundwork for the fashion designer business model of the future. Having singlehandedly invented lifestyle merchandising and advertising, the designer's environmental marketed 1983 Home Collection revolutionized the nation's home furnishings industry. His 1986 flagship at Madison Avenue's 72nd Street changed designer retailing forever. Along the way, the married-with-children designer built one of the largest fashion empires while championing the maverick proposition of style over fashion.
Using more than 350 photos from Lauren's archive, Flusser takes you from the designer's early inspirations to his renowned men's and women's collections, from his exclusive home designs to his five personal residences and, finally, to his museum-quality car collection. In its behind-the-scenes exploration of his world and vision, Ralph Lauren: In His Own Fashion is nothing less than a primer on the vanishing art of good taste.]]> 432 Alan Flusser 1250127408 E 0 2024 4.24
author: Alan Flusser
name: E
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> 6751836 Yves: Peintures, which featured a series of monochromes created in response to cities where he had lived, as a play on the traditional art exhibition catalogue. The medium of the book is consequently an ideal place in which to encounter his art and thought.]]> 160 Klaus Ottmann 8434312107 E 0 to-read 3.45 2010
author: Klaus Ottmann
name: E
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 299810 223 John Berger 0904613925 E 0 to-read 4.09
author: John Berger
name: E
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207293782 Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?� —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock n� rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.]]> 352 Lili Anolik 1668065487 E 0 2024, gifted 3.21 2024
author: Lili Anolik
name: E
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: 2024, gifted
review:

]]> 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�
Ěý
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Ěý
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 152 Ta-Nehisi Coates E 0 kaia, black-authors, 2024 4.40 2015
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: E
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: kaia, black-authors, 2024
review:

]]> 744206 Book by Davis, Angela Y. 281 Angela Y. Davis 0893880221 E 0 to-read 4.45 1971
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: E
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 818709 256 Angela Y. Davis 0679724877 E 0 to-read 4.38 1989
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: E
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53657256 An urgent, vital manifesto of intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism, from leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment—halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are the central histories of feminist organizing—usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color—that continue to cultivate abolition. Also erased is a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.

Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.]]> 150 Angela Y. Davis E 0 to-read 4.29 2022
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: E
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>