en-US Sun, 20 Apr 2025 10:18:51 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 203019740 From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that spans decades.

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

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

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

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope.]]> 608 Chris Whitaker 0593798872 Jack 0 to-read 4.23 2024
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Jack
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction�� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.19 2023
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Jack
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read, short-list
review:

]]> 44581530
Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth—all the Earths.]]> 323 Jeff VanderMeer 0374276803 Jack 5
I went into this book skeptical and dismissed the writing at the beginning as the author trying too hard. But I soon found myself captivated by the flow of it. But let me tell you something - Jeff definitely has the sauce here. I can definitely understand why some would be put off by this book, but I ended up loving how vague and open to interpretation everything was.

I definitely hope to see another book set in this universe in the future. ]]> 3.47 2019
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Jack
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
When I first read Borne, I was impressed with its ideas but felt the writing to be run of the mill and lackluster. Still, by the end, I knew I wanted to know more about The Company; especially once its insidiousness and reach were revealed at the end.

I went into this book skeptical and dismissed the writing at the beginning as the author trying too hard. But I soon found myself captivated by the flow of it. But let me tell you something - Jeff definitely has the sauce here. I can definitely understand why some would be put off by this book, but I ended up loving how vague and open to interpretation everything was.

I definitely hope to see another book set in this universe in the future.
]]> 256280 The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.

Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion--at once brutal, blundering, and wistful--is soon revealed.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.

Winner of the Booker Prize.]]> 344 J.G. Farrell 159017092X Jack 0 to-read 3.93 1973
author: J.G. Farrell
name: Jack
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49354511 Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium��, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid�� flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.]]> 384 Pip Williams 1925972593 Jack 0 to-read 3.97 2020
author: Pip Williams
name: Jack
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 192631581 200 Ángel Bonomini 1945492856 Jack 0 to-read 3.66 2024
author: Ángel Bonomini
name: Jack
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54468020
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from . . . wherever he says he is.

Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.

Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?

In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity…and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.]]> 256 Calvin Kasulke Jack 0 to-read 3.63 2021
author: Calvin Kasulke
name: Jack
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195830893 The Singularity, Ermanno Ismani, an unassuming university professor, is summoned by the minister of defense to accept a two-year, top-secret mission at a mysterious research center, isolated from the world among forests, plunging cliffs, and high mountains. What’s he supposed to do there? Not clear. How long will he be there? No saying.

Still, Ismani takes the mystifying job and, accompanied by his no-nonsense wife, Elisa, heads to the so-called Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, wondering whether, in the midst of the Cold War, it’s some sort of nuclear project he’s been assigned to. But no, the colleagues the couple meets on arrival assure them, it’s nothing like that. It’s much, much more powerful.

At the center of the research complex is strange, shining, at times murmurous, white wall. Behind it, a deep gorge drops away, full of wires and radio towers and mobile sensors and a host of eccentric structures. A question begins to dawn: Could this be the shape of consciousness itself? And if so, whose?

Buzzati's novella of 1960, a pioneering work of Italian science fiction, is published here in a brisk new translation by Anne Milano Appel. In it, Buzzati explores his favorite themes of love and longing while offering a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence.]]> 136 Dino Buzzati 1681378000 Jack 0 to-read 3.65 1960
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Jack
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 1329251
Fantastic literature Manguel writes in his introduction, makes use of our everyday world as a facade through which the undefinable appears, hinting at the half-forgotten dreams of our imagination. Unlike tales of fantasy, fantastic literature deals with what can be best defined as the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls black water breaking into reality. Fantastic literature never really explains everything, it thrives on surprise, on the unexpected logic that is born from its own rules.

Contents:

House taken over by Julio Cortázar
How love came to Professor Guildea by Robert S. Hichens
Climax for a ghost story by I.A. Ireland
The mysteries of the Joy Rio by Tennessee Williams
Pomegranate seed by Edith Wharton
Venetian masks by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The wish house by Rudyard Kipling
The playground by Ray Bradbury
Importance by Manuel Mujica Láinez
Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm
A visitor from down under by L.P. Hartley
Laura by Saki
An injustice revealed
A little place off the Edgware Road by Graham Greene
From "A School Story" by M.R. James
The signalman by Charles Dickens
The tall woman by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
A scent of mimosa by Francis King
Death and the gardener by Jean Cocteau
Lord Mountdrago by W. Somerset Maugham
The sick gentleman's last visit by Giovanni Papini
Insomnia by Virgilio Piñera
The storm by Jules Verne
A dream (from The Arabian Nights Entertainments)
The facts in the case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
Split second by Daphne du Maurier
August 25, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges
How Wang-Fo was saved by Marguerite Yourcenar
From "Peter and Rosa" by Isak Dinesen
Tattoo by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
John Duffy's brother by Flann O'Brien
Lady into fox by David Garnett
Father's last escape by Bruno Schulz
A man by the name of Ziegler by Hermann Hesse
The Argentine ant by Italo Calvino
The lady on the grey by John Collier
The queen of spades by Alexander Pushkin
Of a promise kept by Lafcadio Hearn
The wizard postponed by Juan Manuel
The monkey's paw by W.W. Jacobs
The bottle imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rocking-horse winner by D.H. Lawrence
Certain distant suns by Joanne Greenburg
The third bank of the river by João Guimarães Rosa
Home by Hilaire Belloc
The door in the wall by H.G. Wells
The friends by Silvina Ocampo
Et in sempiternum pereant by Charles Williams
The captives of Longjumeau by Léon Bloy
The visit to the museum by Vladimir Nabakov
Autumn Mountain by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
The sight by Brian Moore
Clorinda by André Pieyre de Mandiargues
The pagan rabbi by Cynthia Ozick
The fisherman and his soul by Oscar Wilde
The bureau d'echange de maux by Lord Dunsany
The ones who walk away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin
In the penal colony by Franz Kafka
A dog in Durer's etching "The Knight, Death and the Devil" by Marco Denevi
The large ant by Howard Fast
The lemmings by Alex Comfort
The grey ones by J.B. Priestley
The feather pillow by Horacio Quiroga
Seaton's aunt by Walter de la Mare
The friends of the friends by Henry James
The travelling companion by Hans Christian Andersen
The curfew tolls by Stephen Vincent Benet
The state of grace by Marcel Aymé
The story of a panic by E.M. Forster
An invitation to the hunt by George Hitchcock
From the "American Notebooks" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The dream by O. Henry]]> 967 Alberto Manguel 0330281410 Jack 0 to-read 4.26 1984
author: Alberto Manguel
name: Jack
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6749
Mister squishy --
The soul is not a smithy --
Incarnations of burned children --
Another pioneer --
Good old neon --
Philosophy and the mirror of nature --
Oblivion --
The suffering channel]]> 329 David Foster Wallace 0316010766 Jack 0 to-read 4.09 2004
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Jack
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.�� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Jack 0 to-read 3.75 2017
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Jack
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29564789 The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy.

‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?��

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.]]> 879 Hilary Mantel Jack 5
And so ends one of the great literary experiences of my life.]]> 4.54 2020
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Jack
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: signed-copies, favorites, folio-society-owned
review:
”Christophe, where’s my breakfast? And my water to wash - I cannot meet God in this state.��

And so ends one of the great literary experiences of my life.
]]> 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Jack 0 to-read 3.92 1992
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Jack
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> 13456414
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.]]> 110 Steven L. Peck 098374842X Jack 0 to-read 4.17 2011
author: Steven L. Peck
name: Jack
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Jack 0 4.23 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Jack
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read, signed-copies, short-list
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]]> 243601 imperium—supreme power in the state.

Of all the great figures of the Roman world, none was more fascinating or charismatic than Cicero. And Tiro—the inventor of shorthand and author of numerous books, including a celebrated biography of his master (which was lost in the Dark Ages)—was always by his side.

Compellingly written in Tiro's voice, Imperium is the re-creation of his vanished masterpiece, recounting in vivid detail the story of Cicero's quest for glory, competing with some of the most powerful and intimidating figures of his—or any other—age: Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, and the many other powerful Romans who changed history.

Robert Harris, the world's master of innovative historical fiction, lures us into a violent, treacherous world of Roman politics at once exotically different from and yet startlingly similar to our own—a world of Senate intrigue and electoral corruption, special prosecutors and political adventurism—to describe how one clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable man fought to reach the top.]]> 305 Robert Harris 074326603X Jack 0 to-read 4.12 2006
author: Robert Harris
name: Jack
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> 18775365 What does the untimely death of one man mean?

Robert Peace was born outside Newark in a ghetto known as "Illtown." His unwed mother worked long hours in a kitchen. His charismatic father was later convicted of a double murder. Peace's intellectual brilliance and hard-won determination earned him a full scholarship to Yale University. At college, while majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, he straddled the world of academia and the world of the street, never revealing his full self in either place. Upon graduation from Yale, he went home to teach at the Catholic high school he'd attended, slid into the drug trade, and was brutally murdered at age thirty.

That's the short version of Robert Peace's life. The long version, the complete version, is this remarkable tour de force by Jeff Hobbs, a talented young novelist who was Peace's college roommate. Hobbs attended Peace's funeral, reached out to his friends from both Yale and Newark, and ultimately decided to write this harrowing and beautiful account of his life.

What does the haunting, untimely death of one man mean? Robert Peace's life doesn't reduce to easy sociological constructions. Through Hobbs's relentless research and remarkable writing, we learn the cost of living between the world Peace was born into and the one his potential allowed him to enter. We see him work, love, fail, succeed, give to others, care for his mother, travel, and dream. We witness the decisions he made for himself and the ones that life forced upon him. But most importantly, we come to understand the sheer complexity of his existence and are irrevocably changed by the fascinating, devastating, and unforgettable life of Robert Peace.]]> 406 Jeff Hobbs 147673190X Jack 0 to-read 4.13 2014
author: Jeff Hobbs
name: Jack
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> 31094296
Simon Stålenhag is back. In his new artbook Things From The Flood, Stålenhag continues the stories of Tales From The Loop, memories of a Nordic childhood infused with strange machines and weird creatures from other dimensions. In Things From The Flood, Stålenhag moves his focus from the 80s to the 90s, the decade of great change when the outside world truly came to Scandinavia. These are tales of the trials of youth, of schoolyard hazings, of first kisses, of finding yourself - and robots.

In addition, this edition includes includes three separate prints (format 260×230 mm) as well as a full-color map (format 520x340mm).]]> 130 Simon Stålenhag 9187222299 Jack 0 to-read 4.30 2016
author: Simon Stålenhag
name: Jack
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 27404461
Simon Stålenhag’s paintings of Swedish 1980s suburbia, populated by fantastic machines and strange beasts, have spread like wildfire on the Internet. The 2015 Kickstarter for the English version of the book raised over $320,000. Stålenhag’s portrayal of a childhood against a backdrop of old Volvo cars and coveralls, combined with strange and mystical machines, creates a unique atmosphere that is both instantly recognizable and utterly alien.

In this top-quality artbook, Simon Stålenhag’s first set of paintings are collected in book form—together with texts that tell the stories of the youth who lived in the shadows of the machines. In addition, three separate prints (format 260×230 mm) as well as a full-color map (format 520x340mm) of the land of The Loop are included in the book.]]> 128 Simon Stålenhag 9187222213 Jack 0 to-read 4.29 2014
author: Simon Stålenhag
name: Jack
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36836025
Simon Stålenhag is the internationally acclaimed author, concept designer, and artist behind Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. His highly imaginative images and stories depicting illusive sci-fi phenomena in mundane, hyper-realistic Scandinavian landscapes have made Stålenhag one of the most sought-after visual storytellers in the world. In The Electric State, Stålenhag turns his unique vision to America.]]> 143 Simon Stålenhag 9187222671 Jack 0 to-read 4.40 2017
author: Simon Stålenhag
name: Jack
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51506 279 David Markson 1564782115 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 3.94 1988
author: David Markson
name: Jack
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, short-list
review:

]]> 811540 224 Denis Johnson 0060988827 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.01 1977
author: Denis Johnson
name: Jack
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, short-list
review:

]]> 139350910 0 Jerry Kosinski Jack 0 to-read, short-list 0.0
author: Jerry Kosinski
name: Jack
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, short-list
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]]> 156188 Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good and evil.]]> 315 William H. Gass 0141180102 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.00 1966
author: William H. Gass
name: Jack
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, short-list
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]]> 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 Jack 0 to-read 3.88 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Jack
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 227989313 144 Solvej Balle 0811238415 Jack 0 to-read 5.00 2022
author: Solvej Balle
name: Jack
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 227989309
Tara Selter er blevet fanget i den 18. november, i en dag der gentager sig. Uden held har hun forsøgt at vende tilbage til en almindelig fremadskridende tid. Hun har forsøgt at skabe årstider ved at rejse nordpå for at finde vinter og sydpå for at finde solskin og sommer. Nu opdager hun, at hun ikke er den eneste, der er fanget i den attende november.]]> 144 Solvej Balle 0811238393 Jack 0 to-read 4.67 2021
author: Solvej Balle
name: Jack
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> 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 Jack 0 to-read 4.15 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Jack
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 58470818
Written in a thrilling torrent of prose by one of our most exciting new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society—fractured by issues of race, class, and violence—and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.]]> 112 Fernanda Melchor 0811231321 Jack 0 to-read 3.56 2021
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Jack
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 51969760 New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian and Boston.com Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumours and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Fernanda Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Through the stories of Luismi, Norma, Brando and Munra, Fernanda Melchor paints a portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or William Faulkner's greatest novels, HURRICANE SEASON takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence - real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around. Written with a brutal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, HURRICANE SEASON, Fernanda Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of contemporary Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by the award-winning translator Sophie Hughes.]]> 229 Fernanda Melchor 1913097099 Jack 4 signed-copies
A little evocative of Faulkner, McCarthy and Marquez, but also something unique in its own right. Sometimes I wondered if the end result equaled the sum of its parts, but a quick and enjoyable read, if not a harrowing one at times. Not for the faint of heart.

I will definitely be checking out the other works Melchor puts out. ]]> 4.08 2017
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Jack
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: signed-copies
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Man, parts of this made my stomach churn.

A little evocative of Faulkner, McCarthy and Marquez, but also something unique in its own right. Sometimes I wondered if the end result equaled the sum of its parts, but a quick and enjoyable read, if not a harrowing one at times. Not for the faint of heart.

I will definitely be checking out the other works Melchor puts out.
]]> 1071726
It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.]]> 191 J.A. Baker Jack 0 to-read 4.15 1967
author: J.A. Baker
name: Jack
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 25489208
When Tim Sunblade escapes from prison, his sole possession is an infallible plan for the ultimate heist. Trouble is it’s a two-person job. So when he meets Virginia, a curiously well-spoken “ten-dollar tramp,�� and discovers that the only thing she cares for is “drifts of money, lumps of it,�� he knows he’s met his partner. What he doesn’t suspect is that this lavender-eyed angel might just prove to be his match.��

Black Wings Has My Angel careens through a landscape of desperate passion and wild reversals. It is a journey you will never forget.]]> 209 Elliott Chaze 1590179161 Jack 0 to-read 4.14 1953
author: Elliott Chaze
name: Jack
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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]]> 544063 The Broom of the System, earned comparisons with the work of John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, and Tom Robbins. But no comparison could prepare us for what is surely one of the most original and adventurous novels of the decade: Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie �� as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel.

On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.

(from dust-jacket of the First Edition, 1996)]]> 1079 David Foster Wallace 0316920045 Jack 0 short-list, currently-reading 4.29 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Jack
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> 24611567 Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction�� (The Washington Post)
��
Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second,��Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction.��Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Ligotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500��titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the��series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date��translations by award-winning translators.]]> 448 Thomas Ligotti 0143107763 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.98 2015
author: Thomas Ligotti
name: Jack
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 911954 To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship.

Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella “The Imago Sequence,�� the International Horror Guild Award-nominated “Proboscis,�� and the never-before-published “Procession of the Black Sloth.�� Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and ravenous insectoid hive-minds hidden just beneath the seemingly benign surface of the Earth.

With colorful protagonists, including an over-the-hill CIA agent, a grizzled Pinkerton detective, and a failed actor accompanying a group of bounty hunters, Barron’s stories are resonant and authentic, featuring vulnerable, hard-boiled tough guys attempting to stand against the stygian wasteland of night. Throughout the collection, themes of desolation, fear, and masculine identity are played out against the backdrop of an indifferent, devouring cosmos.]]> 239 Laird Barron 1597800880 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 4.01 2007
author: Laird Barron
name: Jack
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> 813214
The mist is alive, seething with unearthly sounds and movements. What unleashed this terror? Was it the Arrowhead Project—the top secret government operation that everyone has noticed but no one quite understands?

And what happens when the provisions have run out and you're forced to make your escape, edging blindly through the dim light?]]> 176 Stephen King Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.95 1980
author: Stephen King
name: Jack
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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]]> 1335601
"The Willows" is one of Algernon Blackwood's best known short stories. American horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. "The Willows" is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.]]> 105 Algernon Blackwood 1587156520 Jack 0 4.09 1907
author: Algernon Blackwood
name: Jack
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1907
rating: 0
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]]> 174174 Lord of the Flies, Cold Skin is literary horror that deals with the basest forms of human behavior imaginable, while exploring why we so vehemently fear the Other.]]> 240 Albert Sánchez Piñol 1841958832 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.71 2002
author: Albert Sánchez Piñol
name: Jack
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 20926278
In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie's mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.

Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family's horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It's a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.]]> 405 Stephen King 1476770387 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.78 2014
author: Stephen King
name: Jack
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 13279700
Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret...

...of The Croning.

From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.
]]> 245 Laird Barron 1597802301 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.72 2012
author: Laird Barron
name: Jack
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 29901930
Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.]]> 266 John Langan 1939905214 Jack 0 to-read, lovecraft 3.86 2016
author: John Langan
name: Jack
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 63032 1128 Roberto Bolaño 843396867X Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.22 2004
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Jack
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 119073 552 Umberto Eco 0156001314 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.13 1980
author: Umberto Eco
name: Jack
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 220675583 Emperor of Rome. Now as an illustrated Folio edition, this captivating volume brings ancient history to life with glorious artefacts, paintings, statues, coins, mosaics and photographs.

Editor’s Note
Mandy Kirkby, Editor
In this companion to S.P.Q.R., Mary Beard explores the world of the Roman emperors in 300 years of one-man rule, from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus. Who made it to the top and what did it take to get there? Why they are a byword for corruption, excess and cruelty �� and is it justified? Fizzing with insights and delights, Emperor of Rome also looks at their day-to-day lives �� what they ate, how they travelled, what they did in their spare time and how they coped with the paperwork of a vast empire.

This edition is sumptuously bound in cloth, with a cloth slipcase, both blocked with the emblem of the imperial eagle, and over 100 photographs bring the glory and infamy of the emperors' world to life.��

SYNOPSIS
Mary Beard takes us beyond the familiar tales of mad emperors and imperial excess, offering a fresh and insightful exploration of the rulers who shaped the Roman Empire. Drawing on decades of scholarship, Beard delves into the lives of emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus, uncovering the complexities of their power and the reality behind the myths. Rather than a simple recounting of rulers, she asks intriguing questions: How did emperors wield their influence? What were their daily lives like? And what truly went on behind the palace walls? With a keen eye for detail and a flair for storytelling, Beard brings to life the emperors�� relationships, rivalries, and the everyday Roman citizens who sought their favor. Through this richly woven narrative, Emperor of Rome offers an unparalleled glimpse into the heart of imperial power and the enduring fascination with what it meant to be Roman at the height of its empire.��

PRODUCTION DETAILS
Bound in printed and blocked cloth. ��
Set in Bembo Book with Cenotaph as display ��
440 pages with integrated black & white illustrations and 4 maps ��
48 pages of color photographs
Printed endpapers ��
Slipcase blocked with a motif ��
Sized at 10�� x 6¾”]]> 440 Mary Beard Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 0.0 2023
author: Mary Beard
name: Jack
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2023
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]]> 227871604 The best-selling author of the million-copy classic House of Leaves returns with a magisterial, page-turning epic, about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines in mountains ready to shrug even the bravest from their backs, as one Orvop local would put, with another characterizing the astonishing journey as crazy as it was foolish as it still is just plain beyond imaginin. But them kids went for it anyway.

Not that such daring was entirely unexpected considering how some of those involved included the likes of young Tom Gatestone, already a bit of an Orvop legend, and his friend Kalin March, new to the area, the two of them takin it upon themselves to rescue a couple of neglected horses from the Porch paddocks on Willow and Oak.

Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t?

For sure no one expected the dead to rise but they did. For sure no one expected the mountain to fall but it did. For sure no one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.

As one Orvop high-school teacher would describe that extraordinary feat days before she died: Fer sure, no one expected Kalin March to tell Old Porch: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

In this sweeping tale of mythic proportions, populated by extraordinary characters, the ghosts of the American West, and bursting with unexpected humor, Danielewski tells a masterful story of determination, perseverance, and humanity in the face of long odds and adverse fate.]]> 1232 Mark Z. Danielewski 1524747718 Jack 0 to-read 5.00
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Jack
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 1462289

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 733 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0679423141 Jack 0 to-read 4.24 1872
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Jack
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Jack
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 26839903 Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.]]> 176 Claire-Louise Bennett 1910695092 Jack 0 3.74 2015
author: Claire-Louise Bennett
name: Jack
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 215536999 Who will rebuild God's most holy temple, and at what cost?

In a near-future Jerusalem, harrowing omens plague the a desecrated altar, an unbearable stench, a rampant famine. Shaken but devout, Jonathan, the royal family’s third son, continues to hold services and offer animal sacrifices at the prophesied Third Temple, built to celebrate the founding of the new Kingdom of Judah. His father, Israel’s self-appointed ruler, will surely restore peace and order. But when an angel of God appears and torments Jonathan with warnings of the king’s sacrilege, the foundations of the young priest’s faith—and then his world—begin to give way.

Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Third Temple plunges readers into a tempest of fanaticism, betrayal, and destruction. Where does the power of man end, and the power of God begin? With chilling resonance, this vivid novel from one of Israel’s leading authors sounds an unforgettable warning amidst rising extremism.]]> 320 Yishai Sarid 1632063891 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 4.26 2015
author: Yishai Sarid
name: Jack
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 26854453 Homo sovieticus.�� This ‘red man��: that’s whom Alexievich has been studying since her first book, published in 1985 �� a people and a culture condemned to extinction by the implosion of the
Soviet Union. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl reinvents a singular, polyphonic literary form, bringing together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble.
Alexievich’s method is simple: ‘I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. Try to figure things out. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths... History’s sole concern is the facts; emotions are out of its realm of interest. It’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people...��
From this fascination emerges a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society, built on the traumatisms of its predecessors�� collapse.]]> 695 Svetlana Alexievich 1910695114 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.56 2013
author: Svetlana Alexievich
name: Jack
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 11529868
Considering himself "a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world," Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress "so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like."

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master's Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master's Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today's greatest writers.

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.]]> 443 Adam Johnson 0812992792 Jack 0 4.05 2012
author: Adam Johnson
name: Jack
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 31072
Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.]]> 423 Malcolm Lowry 0060955228 Jack 0 to-read, short-list 3.78 1947
author: Malcolm Lowry
name: Jack
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 150066608 233 Ernest L. KLEIN Jack 0 to-read 0.0
author: Ernest L. KLEIN
name: Jack
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52374 Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.]]> 336 Susan Sontag 0312280866 Jack 0 to-read 4.15 1966
author: Susan Sontag
name: Jack
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Jack 0 to-read 4.18 1999
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Jack
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> 765570 The Pilgrim's Progress is a spiritual as well as a literary classic.

In his introduction, Roger Pooley discusses Bunyan's life and theology, as well as the text's biblical and historical backdrop, its success and critical history. This edition also includes accompanying seventeenth-century illustrations, a chronology, suggested further reading, notes and an index.]]> 344 John Bunyan 0141439718 Jack 0 to-read 3.69 1678
author: John Bunyan
name: Jack
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1678
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 194006 647 Susan Kay 038070322X Jack 0 to-read 4.16 1983
author: Susan Kay
name: Jack
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> 219430717 Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.]]> 304 Charlotte Wood Jack 0 to-read 3.89 2023
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Jack
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 1079488
Thaniel, just seventeen, is a wych-hunter. Together, he and Cathaline - his friend and mentor - track down the fearful creatures that lurk in the Old Quarter of London. It is on one of these hunts that he first encounters Alaizabel Cray. Alaizabel is half-crazed, lovely, and possessed. Whatever dreadful entity has entered her soul has turned her into a strange and unearthly magnet - attracting evil and drawing horrors from ever dark corneer. Cathaline and Thaniel must discover its cause - and defend humanity at all costs.]]> 292 Chris Wooding 0439546567 Jack 4 3.88 2001
author: Chris Wooding
name: Jack
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 201632478 104 Paul Valéry 1681378922 Jack 0 to-read 3.82 1896
author: Paul Valéry
name: Jack
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1896
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 13595664
Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the novels The Mere Future, Shimmer, Rat Bohemia, After Delores, and People in Trouble, as well as nonfiction works such as The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, which is also published by Duke University Press. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

"This is an extraordinary, challenging and moving book. It is both an honest account of the work Sarah Schulman had to do to allow the full reality of the occupation of Palestine to be registered in her consciousness, and a story �� told firmly yet gently, with patience and care�� of the shared labour of building activist worlds on occupied grounds. We embark on a journey with Sarah Schulman and many other activists, from Palestine, the US and beyond, as they persist in the effort to make the liberation of Palestine essential to queer politics. We follow their footsteps, we trace the paths; we hear the conversations; we share the meals. If activism involves hard often painstaking work, if it involves mundane and ordinary tasks, we learn that it can also create connections that nourish and sustain. I hope this book becomes our teacher. I hope we join the invitation to become part of a new queer international where liberation for all is the common goal."—Sara Ahmed, author of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

"This is a great book, brave and compassionate. A journey of discovery, a coming of age, and more important, a search for justice. Our world is a better place for its existence. Read it, please." —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Hakawati]]> 193 Sarah Schulman 0822353733 Jack 0 to-read 4.00 2012
author: Sarah Schulman
name: Jack
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 208433102 A collection of over thirty short stories by one of the greatest fiction writers in American history, now available in a single volume for the first time ever.The immensity of Gallant's achievement still seems insufficiently recognized. Alice Munro's Nobel notwithstanding, Gallant may in fact have been the best pure story writer since the early-1950s prime of Cheever, Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, Gallant's stories are sui generis. They do something different than perfecting the tradition or stretching the boundaries of what the form can do. For all their expansiveness, Gallant's stories constitute a striking and almost avant-garde in reading her, one feels like they discover something about what a short story really is and isn't - about what is necessary, and what is sufficient.��The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes over thirty stories never before collected in one volume, including��"The Accident" and "His Mother" and "An Autobiography" and "Dedé." With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master's fiction will be in print.]]> 624 Mavis Gallant 1681378744 Jack 0 to-read 4.43
author: Mavis Gallant
name: Jack
average rating: 4.43
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rating: 0
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]]> 13330375 ��
Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has, Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother.
��
First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.]]> 256 Dorothy Baker 1590176014 Jack 0 to-read 4.11 1962
author: Dorothy Baker
name: Jack
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> 33301104 Flights, which was awarded Poland's biggest literary prize in 2008, is a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the real Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg, discovering in so doing the Achilles tendon. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death in spite of his daughter's ever more desperate protests, as well as the story of Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister's skirt supports. From the present we have the trials and tribulations of a wife accompanying her much older professor husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, or the quest of a Polish woman who immigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, or the slow descent into madness of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanished on a vacation on a Croatian island and then appeared again with no explanation. These narratives are interspersed with short bursts of analysis that enrich and connect them, including digressions on relics, travel-sized cosmetics, belly dancing, maps, the Maori, Wikipedia, Cleopatra, Ataturk, the effects of airports on the psyche, and many more rich and varied topics. Perfectly intertwining travel narratives and reflections on travel with observations on the body and on life and death, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and deeper and deeper]]> 410 Olga Tokarczuk 1910695432 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 3.93 2007
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Jack
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 40491227 The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre �� the collective autobiography �� in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism�� (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.]]> 232 Annie Ernaux 1910695785 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.33 2008
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Jack
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> 33301083 Anatomy of Melancholy. The essay may not even be written, but instead a photo essay, film essay, radio essay or some hybrid of these and the literary archetype. It may belong to a self-conscious genre and have been written by an essayist who self-declares as such; or it might be conjured from a milieu where the labels 'essay' and 'essayist' would make no sense at all. The essay, in short, is a varied and various artefact. Its occasion might be scholarly - there are academic essays, though they tend to be essays to the extent that they wish to stop being academic - or it may be journalistic, institutional or 'creative'. The essay can be tethered to a specific (perhaps polemical) context or written with an ambition to timeless or universal import. Whatever its motivation or avowed theme, the essay possesses a style and a voice. Generic, structural and contextual definitions will vary, but the essay is at least recognizable by its having a certain texture - the essay alters or interferes to some degree with the language of non-fiction. Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together]]> 138 Brian Dillon 1910695416 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.18 2017
author: Brian Dillon
name: Jack
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 58496574 448 Alaa Abd El-Fattah 1913097749 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.57
author: Alaa Abd El-Fattah
name: Jack
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 36252356 365 Kate Briggs 1910695459 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.34 2018
author: Kate Briggs
name: Jack
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 13065400 ��
The Norman Conquest starts with the most decisive battle in English history and continues with dramatic rebellions and their ruthless suppression, eventually resulting in the creation of the English nation. The repercussions of the Conquest are with us still.
��
The book begins with the Saxon kings, specifically Edward the Confessor, and shows how England was in constant conflict as the English fell prey to both Vikings and Normans. In the north, King Harold destroys his Viking namesake at the battle of Stamford Bridge but immediately has to hurry south to confront William of Normandy at Hastings. His defeat, and the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon warrior caste, leads inexorably to William's forceful occupation of an unwilling country, and this is the ruthless story Marc Morris tells. It is a drama crammed with intrigue, bloodshed and betrayal, featuring vivid, almost deranged Edward the Confessor, who spurns his queen in their marriage bed to spite her family, even though it spells the end of his own dynasty; the heroic King Harold, the hero of Stamford Bridge and the last Saxon king, who perjures himself, betrays his brother and puts aside his wife in his bid for the throne; William the Bastard, later known as the Conqueror, who assembles the mightiest invasion fleet in the middle ages and after unexpected success almost destroys the country he has won.]]> 464 Marc Morris 0091931452 Jack 0 to-read 4.16 2012
author: Marc Morris
name: Jack
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 46024004 The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours�� drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.]]> 351 Jon Fosse Jack 0 currently-reading 4.04 2019
author: Jon Fosse
name: Jack
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 923832
Published to wide acclaim in 1976, but almost neglected since then, The Auctioneer is a bona fide classic of American literature. The story of John Moore, his wife Mim, and his mother, it is a gripping tale of greed in a small town being quietly overrun by auctioneer Perly Dunsmore. Acclaimed by writers including Stephen King, and an influence on King’s Needful Things, The Auctioneer is here reprinted for the first time in thirty years.]]> 260 Joan Samson 1933618191 Jack 0 to-read 3.72 1976
author: Joan Samson
name: Jack
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> 7779571
Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the “notifiers�� who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days�� leave being offered by their commander—a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as POW.

In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers, and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a “war and peace�� rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew.

Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.]]> 581 David Grossman 0307592979 Jack 0 to-read 3.96 2008
author: David Grossman
name: Jack
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> 55817233 240 Joshua Cohen 1913097609 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 3.81 2021
author: Joshua Cohen
name: Jack
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 60246552
Jon Fosse’s ​S���ٴDZ��Dz��� is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience �� incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.]]> 825 Jon Fosse 1804270067 Jack 0 to-read, signed-copies 4.50 2022
author: Jon Fosse
name: Jack
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 17349731 912 William Makepeace Thackeray 0141199547 Jack 0 to-read 3.91 1847
author: William Makepeace Thackeray
name: Jack
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1847
rating: 0
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]]> 656
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.


Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.]]> 1392 Leo Tolstoy 0192833987 Jack 0 to-read 4.14 1869
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Jack
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1869
rating: 0
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]]> 33600
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.

Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.

Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.]]> 936 Gregory David Roberts 192076920X Jack 0 to-read 4.27 2003
author: Gregory David Roberts
name: Jack
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> 39359728 “Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us.�� —Hilary Mantel

In myth, Theseus was the slayer of the child-devouring Minotaur in Crete. What the founder-hero might have been in real life is another question, brilliantly explored in The King Must Die. Drawing on modern scholarship and archaeological findings at Knossos, Mary Renault’s Theseus is an utterly lifelike figure—a king of immense charisma, whose boundless strivings flow from strength and weakness—but also one steered by implacable prophecy.

The story follows Theseus’s adventures from Troizen to Eleusis, where the death in the book’s title is to take place, and from Athens to Crete, where he learns to jump bulls and is named king of the victims. Richly imbued with the spirit of its time, this is a page-turner as well as a daring act of imagination.

Renault’s story of Theseus continues with the sequel The Bull from the Sea.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author.
]]> 354 Mary Renault 1480433128 Jack 0 to-read 3.92 1958
author: Mary Renault
name: Jack
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> 67700 The Persian Boy traces the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland.
Their relationship sustains Alexander as he weathers assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a sometimes-mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper. After Alexander’s mysterious death, we are left wondering if this Persian boy understood the great warrior and his ambitions better than anyone.]]> 420 Mary Renault 0394751019 Jack 0 to-read 4.18 1972
author: Mary Renault
name: Jack
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> 71704
Simultaneously, a second plot unfolds: that of the modern-day translator of the ancient text, who, as he proceeds with his work, becomes convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning in the text, one that can be interpreted through certain repeated words and images. As the story advances, however, the translator is alarmed to discover references to himself, which seem to address him personally in an increasingly menacing fashion.]]> 314 José Carlos Somoza 0349116180 Jack 0 to-read 3.87 2001
author: José Carlos Somoza
name: Jack
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> 53780642 A workplace novel of the 22nd century

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.

The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born, and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before �� and what it means to be truly alive.

Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.]]> 136 Olga Ravn Jack 0 to-read 3.69 2018
author: Olga Ravn
name: Jack
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 823 Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe--London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds--risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox.

And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance.

A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time.

And it's just the beginning...

(back cover)

This P.S. edition includes 16 pages of supplementary materials.

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan
Cover illustration from the Mary Evans Picture Library; painting of Great Fire of London on stepback]]> 927 Neal Stephenson Jack 0 to-read 3.91 2003
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Jack
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 816 Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods—World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, crypt analyst extraordinaire, and gung-ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first... Of course, to observe is not its real duty—we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes—inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe—team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.]]> 1152 Neal Stephenson Jack 0 to-read 4.24 1999
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Jack
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> 41805213
Then Fatima meets Isam, a poet like her; they email love letters to each other and meet in secret. Saqr, however, has other ideas: she is married off to Faris, a complete stranger. He's not the cruel tyrant her brother was, but still she did not choose him.

Will she escape her past to live the life of love and poetry she craves?]]> 224 Bothayna Al-Essa 9774169085 Jack 0 to-read 3.59
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Jack
average rating: 3.59
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 24874328
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375).

Boccaccio's Decameron is available in Penguin Classics in both a complete and selected edition.]]> 54 Giovanni Boccaccio 0141397829 Jack 3 Saucy 3.25 1353
author: Giovanni Boccaccio
name: Jack
average rating: 3.25
book published: 1353
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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Saucy
]]> 6452930 320 August Strindberg 1870041828 Jack 0 to-read 3.22 1879
author: August Strindberg
name: Jack
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1879
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 141834 A Dream Play, written in 1901, characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image. As Strindberg himself wrote in his Preface, he wanted “to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.��

Caryl Churchill’s spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called “fresh, new and magical�� (Telegraph).

Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of ‘people’s writer.’]]> 64 August Strindberg 1559362707 Jack 0 to-read 3.74 1901
author: August Strindberg
name: Jack
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1901
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]]> 45894053 Unquiet is a stunning, genre- bending meditation on time, memory, and language, on growing up and growing old.]]> 402 Linn Ullmann 0393357651 Jack 0 to-read 3.96 2015
author: Linn Ullmann
name: Jack
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 201054573
Med utgangspunkt i etterlatte papirer, brev og gamle fotografier setter sønnen sammen fortellingen om farens barndom: i Egypt, hvor guttens far, Dommeren, holder sin lille familie i et kolonialt jerngrep, hos fremmede i Bærum, på pensjonatskole i Genève, på hotellrom opp og ned gjennom et Europa på vei mot en ny stor krig.

«Fars rygg» er skildringen av en gutt og ung manns for.søk på å leve i en verden han ikke forstår, men likevel prøver å bli en del av. Det er også historien om fars mor, Ellen, som sitter fast i et ulykkelig ekteskap.

Niels Fredrik Dahl har skrevet en stor og dypt menneskelig roman, øm, mørk og full av humor, om familie og kjærlighet i det 20. århundre, om en gutt og en mor som er bundet sammen av ensomhet, og om en ensomhet som går i arv.]]> 340 Niels Fredrik Dahl 8249521579 Jack 0 to-read 4.06 2023
author: Niels Fredrik Dahl
name: Jack
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 74964122 226 Charles Dodd White 195695709X Jack 0 to-read 4.09 2014
author: Charles Dodd White
name: Jack
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 22114725


Luther Redding lost his job, and almost lost his wife, Pamela, and teenaged daughters Katie and Lucy, when the real estate bubble burst in Florida. Now he pilots a Reaper drone over the mountains of Afghanistan from a command center in the bowels of Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, studying a target's pattern of life and awaiting the command to end that life. Meanwhile Bobby Rosen has returned home from his tours in Iraq to a broken marriage and an estranged son, his promising military career cut short in a moment of terrible violence in a Sadr City marketplace. As the tales of Luther and Bobby unfold, Mark Powell masterfully engages with the vexing, bifurcated lives of combatants in the global war on terror, those who are simultaneously here and there and thus never fully freed from the life-and-death chaos of the battlefield.



As Bobby sets off on a drug-fueled road trip with his brother Donny, newly released from prison and consumed by his own inescapable impulses, a sudden death in the Redding household sends Luther's daughter Katie spiraling into grief and self-destruction. Soon the lives of the Reddings and the Rosens intersect as the collateral damage from the war on terror sends these families into a rapid descent of violence and moral ambiguity that seems hauntingly familiar to Bobby while placing Katie in a position much like her father's―more removed witness than active participant in the bloody war unfolding in front of her. Overarching questions of faith and redemption clash with the rough-hewn realities of terror and loss, all to explosive ends in Powell's dark vision of modern Americana.



Novelist Ron Rash has deemed Powell "the best Appalachian novelist of his generation." In this, his fourth novel, Powell broadens the southern backdrop of his earlier work into a sprawling thriller taking readers from the Middle East to Charleston, southern Georgia, Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, and into the storied American West. In its themes, perspectives, and pacing, The Sheltering recalls the work of Robert Stone, Jim Harrison, and Ben Fountain while further establishing Powell as a unique voice capable of interrogating unfathomable truths with a beauty and cohesion of language that challenges our assumptions of the human spirit.]]> 305 Mark Powell 1611174341 Jack 0 to-read 3.95 2014
author: Mark Powell
name: Jack
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 40663721
The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.

Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.]]> 353 Katya Apekina 1937512754 Jack 0 to-read 4.12 2018
author: Katya Apekina
name: Jack
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 8496342 198 Guy Owen 1935708007 Jack 0 to-read 4.23 2010
author: Guy Owen
name: Jack
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 8123045 A��novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose. An extraordinary feat of storytelling and breathtaking invention on a grand scale, it is a tour de force from a writer who has turned science fiction on its head."Unexpectedly savage, emotionally powerful, and impossible to forget." —The TimesIn a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one �� maybe two �� people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever.Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilizations throughout the greater galaxy.Concealing her new identity �� and her particular set of abilities �� might be a dangerous strategy, however. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.The Culture SeriesConsider PhlebasThe Player of GamesUse of WeaponsThe State of the ArtExcessionInversionsLook to WindwardMatterSurface DetailThe Hydrogen Sonata]]> 620 Iain M. Banks Jack 4 4.34 2008
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Jack
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 45735014
A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It’s also very, very funny.]]> 1020 Lucy Ellmann 1771963077 Jack 0 to-read 4.19 2019
author: Lucy Ellmann
name: Jack
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> 12013 Excession, the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section orders Diplomat Byr Gen-Hofoen to steal the soul of a long-dead starship captain. By accepting the mission, Byr irrevocably plunges himself into a conspiracy: one that could either lead the universe into an age of peace or to the brink of annihilation.]]> 500 Iain M. Banks 0553575376 Jack 5 4.20 1996
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Jack
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 816763 341 W. Somerset Maugham 0099284863 Jack 5
The characterization of Elliot was very funny until it just got sad. Felt a like a mix of Fitzgerald and Hemingway with a touch of Dostoevsky thrown in. ]]> 4.15 1944
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Jack
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1944
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
I really enjoyed this quiet observer-narrative about how the little decisions we make define who we become over the course of our lives.

The characterization of Elliot was very funny until it just got sad. Felt a like a mix of Fitzgerald and Hemingway with a touch of Dostoevsky thrown in.
]]> 119512 314 László Krasznahorkai 0811215040 Jack 0 to-read 4.22 1989
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jack
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> 11455485 Satantango is proof that “the devil has all the good times.��

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.”]]> 274 László Krasznahorkai 0811217345 Jack 0 to-read 4.19 1985
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jack
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> 205218 Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work—an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding—moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity's place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness. A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection. The Ethics is presented in the standard translation of the work by Edwin Curley. This edition also includes an introduction by Stuart Hampshire, outlining Spinoza's philosophy and placing it in context.]]> 186 Baruch Spinoza 0140435719 Jack 0 to-read 4.10 1677
author: Baruch Spinoza
name: Jack
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1677
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
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]]>