en-US Sat, 21 Sep 2024 23:32:41 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 15795419 Mother’s Milk, the fourth installment in Edward St. Aubyn’s wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, sees Patrick as a lawyer, married, with a five-year-old child and another on the way. The novel shifts points of view from Patrick—furious over his mother’s decision to sell their mansion in the South of France to a ridiculous New Age hippie—to Patrick’s wife, overburdened by motherhood, to Patrick’s mother, growing senile and despondent, and even to Patrick’s young son Robert, who reflects with hilarious and disturbing clarity on the moments of his birth.
]]> 0 Edward St. Aubyn 1466828188 Jack 3 2019-reads 3.84 2005
author: Edward St. Aubyn
name: Jack
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2018/12/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 44303730 Rocketman.

Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three, he was on his first tour of America, facing an astonished audience in his tight silver hotpants, bare legs and a T-shirt with ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned across it in sequins. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again.

His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with the Queen; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation. All the while, Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade.

In Me Elton also writes about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father.]]> 374 Elton John 1250147603 Jack 4 4.30 2019
author: Elton John
name: Jack
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/29
date added: 2020/03/11
shelves: recovery, non-fiction, 2019-reads
review:

]]> 12085843 New York Times Notable Book of 2012

One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books 2011

One of Esquire's Best Books of 2012

One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012

Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel.

As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works�Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk�are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined.

The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety. . . at last.]]> 272 Edward St. Aubyn 0374298890 Jack 4 2019-reads 3.89 2011
author: Edward St. Aubyn
name: Jack
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 6091075
God only knows what it all means. And fortunately, He left behind a Final Message of explanation. But since it's light-years away from Earth, on a star surrounded by souvenir booths, finding out what it is will mean hitching a ride to the far reaches of space aboard a UFO with a giant robot. But what else is new?]]> 225 Douglas Adams 0307497909 Jack 4 2019-reads 4.14 1984
author: Douglas Adams
name: Jack
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2019/02/02
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 40242274

The answer: turn to Burton G. Malkiel’s advice in his reassuring, authoritative, gimmick-free, and perennially best-selling guide to investing. Long established as the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio or 401(k), A Random Walk Down Wall Street now features new material on “tax-loss harvesting,� the crown jewel of tax management; the current bitcoin bubble; and automated investment advisers; as well as a brand-new chapter on factor investing and risk parity. And as always, Malkiel’s core insights—on stocks and bonds, as well as real estate investment trusts, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles� along with the book’s classic life-cycle guide to investing, will help restore confidence and composure to anyone seeking a calm route through today’s financial markets.]]> 432 Burton G. Malkiel 1324002182 Jack 4 2019-reads 4.18 1973
author: Burton G. Malkiel
name: Jack
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/01
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 5647399 The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton!Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation."Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." —David McCullough“A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." —Joseph Ellis

Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,� Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.� Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.

9780143034759]]> 818 Ron Chernow Jack 5 non-fiction, 2019-reads 4.53 2004
author: Ron Chernow
name: Jack
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/31
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: non-fiction, 2019-reads
review:

]]> 8708500 352 Lawrence Block 0061806641 Jack 5 recovery, 2019-reads 4.18 1982
author: Lawrence Block
name: Jack
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/09
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: recovery, 2019-reads
review:

]]> 18895093 217 Lawrence Block 1938135016 Jack 5 2019-reads 4.22 1981
author: Lawrence Block
name: Jack
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/27
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 9114219 272 Lawrence Block 0061802654 Jack 5 2019-reads 3.97 1976
author: Lawrence Block
name: Jack
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/25
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 5193476 304 Lawrence Block 0061807125 Jack 3 2019-reads 3.95 1976
author: Lawrence Block
name: Jack
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1976
rating: 3
read at: 2019/01/30
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]> 8710617 132 Lawrence Block 0061797588 Jack 4 2019-reads 3.98 1976
author: Lawrence Block
name: Jack
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2019/01/12
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: 2019-reads
review:

]]>