en-US Wed, 26 Mar 2025 06:15:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 216971219 A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .]]> 400 Chuck Wendig 0593156560 Joanna 0 to-read 3.89 2025
author: Chuck Wendig
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.89
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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 Joanna 0 to-read 4.28 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.28
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]]> 221733727 There’s no place like home�

Blake Porter is riding high, until he's not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone that he shares with his fiancee, he's desperate to make ends meet.

Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She's exactly what Blake's looking for. Or is she?

Because something isn't quite right. The neighbors start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night. And soon Blake fears someone knows his darkest secrets...

Danger lives right at home, and by the time Blake realizes it, it'll be far too late. The trap is already set.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden knocks at your door with a gripping story of revenge, privilege, and secrets turned sour�]]> 368 Freida McFadden 1464238812 Joanna 0 to-read 4.25 2025
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.25
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]]> 38598541
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 51 Audre Lorde 0241339723 Joanna 0 to-read 4.56 2018
author: Audre Lorde
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 59937516
A girl grows up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, believing that she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world.

Years later, as a young woman with unattainable ideals, she meets someone who calls everything into question, and is forced to confront episodes from her past. Their relationship takes her from London to Barcelona and the precipice of a new life, full of sensuality. Yet she still feels an uneasiness. In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should take and learn how to feel deserving of love and care.]]> 256 Jessica Andrews 1473682851 Joanna 0 to-read 3.63 2022
author: Jessica Andrews
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> 32842454 The Year of Magical Thinking two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks--writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles--and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through.

And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book, Where I Was From.]]> 160 Joan Didion 1524732796 Joanna 0 to-read 3.69 2017
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.69
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]]> 53308149
Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous; a visit to San Simeon; being rejected by Stanford; dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home; and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on "Why I Write"; a piece about short stories from New West in 1978; and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.]]> 149 Joan Didion 059331848X Joanna 0 to-read 3.85 2021
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.85
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]]> 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion Joanna 0 to-read 4.20 1968
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1968
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]]> 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Joanna 0 currently-reading 3.94 2005
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
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]]> 207293782 Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?� —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock n� rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.]]> 352 Lili Anolik 1668065487 Joanna 0 to-read 3.21 2024
author: Lili Anolik
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
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]]> 62047992 The moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading.

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.]]> 150 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278677 Joanna 0 currently-reading 3.67 2010
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> 101161160 A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.]]> 331 Myriam Gurba 198218647X Joanna 0 4.32 2023
author: Myriam Gurba
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 75374437 272 Tony Santorella 1838957014 Joanna 3 What a ride. 3.47 2023
author: Tony Santorella
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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What a ride.
]]> 28048 Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.

Originally published in 2004, now with a new foreword and afterword, Solnit’s influential book shines a light into the darkness of our time in an unforgettable new edition.]]> 192 Rebecca Solnit 1841956600 Joanna 0 to-read 4.01 2004
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2004
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]]> 30259572 andenjoy everything more on both the sensual and profound levels? Preposterous!

Yet here is a toolkit to help you do just that. A tweak here, a twiddle there; every strategy in The Art Of Frugal Hedonism has been designed to help you target the most important habits of mind and action needed for living frugally but hedonistically. Apply a couple, and you'll definitely have a few extra dollars in your pocket and enjoy more sunsets. Apply the lot, and you'll wake up one day and realise that you're happier, wealthier, fitter, and more in lust with life than you'd ever thought possible.]]> 256 Annie Raser-Rowland 0994392818 Joanna 0 to-read 3.77 2017
author: Annie Raser-Rowland
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 24453082 Big Magic cracks open a world of wonder and joy.]]> 276 Elizabeth Gilbert 1594634718 Joanna 0 to-read 3.95 2015
author: Elizabeth Gilbert
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 55481231
As Martha Beck says in her book, “Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period.�

In The Way of Integrity , Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us—people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits—all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole.

Inspired by The Divine Comedy , Beck uses Dante’s classic hero’s journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us.

With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but also bring us to a place of genuine happiness.]]> 327 Martha N. Beck 1984881485 Joanna 0 to-read 4.15 2021
author: Martha N. Beck
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 48828984 A "startlingly original" novel of "recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make" (Alexander Chee, Paris Review).

Alma and her family live close to the land, raising chickens and sheep. While her husband works at a nearby college, she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind--speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York.

In a series of flashbacks, Alma reveals the circumstances and choices that led to this moment: the joys and claustrophobia of their remote life; her fears and uncertainties about motherhood; the painfully awkward faculty dinners; her feelings of loneliness and failure; and her growing fascination with Celeste, a mysterious ceramicist and self-loving doppelgänger who becomes an obsession for Alma.

A fable both blistering and surreal, The Shame is a propulsive, funny, and thought-provoking debut about a woman in isolation, whose mind--fueled by capitalism, motherhood, and the search for meaningful art--attempts to betray her.

A Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020, Selected by Miciah Bay Gault]]> 160 Makenna Goodman 157131136X Joanna 3 3.63 2020
author: Makenna Goodman
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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]]> 210678433
Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 160 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761385992 Joanna 0 currently-reading 4.12 2019
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> 139391940 A spicy small-town romance and TikTok phenomenon, perfect for fans of Hannah Grace and Stephanie Archer.

When Jeanie's aunt gifts her the beloved Pumpkin Spice Café in the small town of Dream Harbor, Jeanie jumps at the chance for a fresh start away from her very dull desk job.

Logan is a local farmer who avoids Dream Harbor's gossip at all costs. But Jeanie's arrival disrupts Logan's routine and he wants nothing to do with the irritatingly upbeat new girl, except that he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her.

Will Jeanie's happy-go-lucky attitude win over the grumpy-but-gorgeous Logan, or has this city girl found the one person in town who won't fall for her charm, or her pumpkin spice lattes�

The Pumpkin Spice Café is a cozy romantic mystery for fans of Gilmore Girls, with a grumpy x sunshine dynamic, a small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:

� grumpy x sunshine
� small town
� found family
� spicy]]> 373 Laurie Gilmore 0008610665 Joanna 2 3.36 2023
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/19
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the devil couldn’t reach me so he gave me sex scenes in audiobooks
]]> 196241667 From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller and viral TikTok phenomenon, The Pumpkin Spice Café, comes a brand new spicy romance set in Dream Harbor!

When a secret message turns up hidden in a book in the Cinnamon Bun Bookstore, Hazel can't understand it. As more secret codes appear between the pages, she decides to follow the trail of clues� she just need someone to help her out.

Gorgeous and outgoing fisherman, Noah, is always up for an adventure. And a scavenger hunt sounds like a lot of fun. Even better that the cute bookseller he's been crushing on for months is the one who wants his help!

Hazel didn’t go looking for romance, but as the treasure hunt leads her and Noah around Dream Harbor, their undeniable chemistry might be just as hot as the fresh-out-of-the-oven cinnamon buns the bookstore sells�

The Cinnamon Bun Book Store is a cozy romantic mystery with a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:
� opposites attract
� small town
� forced proximity
� he falls first]]> 384 Laurie Gilmore Joanna 0 currently-reading 3.67 2024
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 220255008 From the international bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café and The Cinnamon Bun Book Store, comes the highly anticipated Dream Harbor romance for 2025!

A wedding in Dream Harbor can only mean one thing, everyone wants to get involved!

With Jeanie and Logan set to tie the knot, and Kira desperate to hire out her newly renovated barn at the Christmas tree farm, everything seems to be going well. Annie has agreed to bake the cake, and Mac is responsible for, well� just being Mac. And as the whole of Dream Harbor comes together to celebrate the wedding of the year with the snow falling around them, can Annie and Mac put aside their dislike for each just long enough for the �I Do’s� or is that one request too far�

The Gingerbread Bakery is a cozy romantic novel with an enemies to lovers dynamic, small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:

� enemies to lovers
� found family
� small town
� forced proximity]]> 384 Laurie Gilmore 0008728097 Joanna 0 to-read 3.90 2025
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
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]]> 213186396 Fall in love with the brand new spring romance set in Dream Harbor, from the bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café.

As a renowned chef, single-dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive.

Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when Mayor Kelly suggests Archer is looking for a nanny, and Iris might be available, she shudders at the thought. But in need of money she reluctantly agrees.

As Archer and Iris get used to their new roles, is it possible that they might have more in common than they first thought, or is Olive just determined to play match-maker�

Tropes:

� single dad
� forced proximity
� slow burn
� found family
� one bed]]> 361 Laurie Gilmore 0008713340 Joanna 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 6617921 248 Olga Tokarczuk 8086264351 Joanna 5 4.33 1996
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
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I may be biased but I don’t care. Magical realism, raw reality of war inherently linked to the Polish experience, well-structured. It was a difficult read and I’m glad I took my time with it. Some parts were so traumatic I doubted I will finish the book but I’m happy I did.
]]> 923808 352 Ed Gorman 0451451481 Joanna 2 3.88 1989
author: Ed Gorman
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 176443093
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing� felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.]]> 368 Patric Gagne 166800318X Joanna 3 3.74 2024
author: Patric Gagne
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 214175247 An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse townsâ€�; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journeyĚýto become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans.ĚýInĚýThe Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,ĚýCaseĚýbrings her trademarkĚýcandor andĚýprecisionĚýto a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisibleĚýgirl “raised by two dogs and a space heaterâ€� in rural Washington state toĚýher improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, CaseĚýshows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel theĚýmonotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love YouĚýis a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.


Ěý±Ő±Ő> 288 Neko Case 1538710501 Joanna 0 to-read 4.10 2025
author: Neko Case
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> 211004894
"Kari Ferrell’s memoir is a zippy, intimate account of low-level trickery before the era of scams fully erupted." —The Atlantic

"Raw and riveting. With a combination of bruising vulnerability and self-deprecating humor, Ferrell’s audacious coming-of-age tale pairs the thrill of true crime with the redemptive arc of a good memoir. It’s a deliciously edgy testament to reinvention." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The compelling, edgy, compassionate, laugh-out-loud memoir from Kari Ferrell, formerly known as the "Hipster Grifter"

Before Anna Delvey, before the Tinder Swindler, there was Kari Ferrell. Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with questions of self-worth and identity as one of the few Asian Americans in her insulated community, leading her to run with the “bad crowd� in an effort to fit in.

Soon, stealing from superstores turned into picking up men (and picking their pockets), and before she knew it, Kari graduated from petty theft to Utah’s most wanted list. Though Kari was able to escape the Southwest, she couldn’t outrun her new moniker: the Hipster Grifter.

New York City’s indie sleaze scene had found its newest celebrity—just as Kari found herself in a heap of trouble. Jail time, riots, bad checks, and an explosion of internet infamy and fetishization put her name in the spotlight. Beyond the gossip and Gawker posts, there’s a side to Kari the media never saw—until now.]]> 288 Kari Ferrell 1250288223 Joanna 0 to-read 3.35 2025
author: Kari Ferrell
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207611566 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]> 482 Grady Hendrix 0593548981 Joanna 0 to-read 4.02 2025
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Joanna 0 to-read 3.70 2025
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217388429 Scream meets The Guest List in this wickedly compelling and compulsively page-turning thriller of friendship and murder from the author of The Lost Village, Camilla Sten.

On a remote, craggy island nestled off the coast of Sweden, four friends—Tilly, Anna, Linnea and Evelina—meet every year. Best friends since childhood, the idea is to drink beer, dance by the water, and shake off the weight of life's expectations. The location of the island is a secret to everyone but them. One night of reckless fun and secret-sharing, and then they return to their normal lives.

Ten years later. Ever since she was a teenager, Tessa Nilsson has been consumed by the story of four friends who disappeared on their annual trip to a remote island together. As her true crime fervor turned into a wildly popular podcast, Tessa urgently covered Sweden’s most gruesome cases, but could never find the answers behind what happened to these women who disappeared, leaving a few maddening clues but no concrete answers. Now Tessa’s podcast has crashed and burned, any chance she had at uncovering the truth vanishing with it.

Anneliese is Tessa’s best friend, and before she walks down the aisle, she wants to have a bachelorette party. The Baltic Vinyasa, a sleek, sophisticated yoga retreat on a small island off the coast—one with such similar characteristics to the tragedy years ago that it raises the hair on Tessa’s neck. The idea is to drink gallons of cava, do sunrise yoga, and get in their last chance to bond with the bride. Tessa will not pass this up. It’s her last chance to find out what happened to the four women, once and for all.

And it’s someone else’s last chance to get revenge.]]> 304 Camilla Sten 1250868505 Joanna 0 to-read 3.60 2025
author: Camilla Sten
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220161576 In this razor-sharp, diabolical debut thriller, a young woman steps into her deceased twin’s influencer life, only to discover dark secrets hidden behind her social media façade.

Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything. Except a pulse.

Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL). When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she’s always envied.

Transforming into Chloe is easier than expected. Julie effortlessly adopts Chloe’s luxurious influencer life, complete with designer clothes, a meticulous skincare routine, and millions of adoring followers. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe’s seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but.

Haunted by Chloe’s untimely death and struggling to fit into the privileged influencer circle, Julie faces mounting challenges during a weeklong island retreat with Chloe’s exclusive group of influencer friends. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.]]> 320 Liann Zhang 1668067897 Joanna 0 to-read 3.89 2025
author: Liann Zhang
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213570821 From the bestselling author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour comes a chilling, compulsive story of five amateur sleuths, whose hunt for an elusive killer catapults them into danger as the world watches.

It's the most famous crime in modern history. But only she knows the true story.

After the unexpected death of her father, college student Jane Sharp longs for a distraction from her grief. She becomes obsessed with true crime, befriending armchair detectives who teach her how to hunt killers from afar. In this morbid internet underground, Jane finds friendship, purpose, and even glory...

So when news of the shocking deaths of three college girls in Delphine, Idaho takes the world by storm, and sleuths everywhere race to solve the crimes, Jane and her friends are determined to beat them. But the case turns out to be stranger than anyone expected. Details don't add up, the police are cagey, and there seems to be more media hype and internet theorizing than actual evidence. When Jane and her sleuths take a step closer, they find that every answer only begs more questions. Something's not adding up, and they begin to suspect their killer may be smarter and more prolific than any they've faced before. Placing themselves in the center of the story starts to feel more and more like walking into a trap...

Told one year after the astounding events that concluded the case and left the world reeling, when Jane has finally decided to break her silence about what really happened, she tells the true story of the Delphine Massacres. And what she has to confess will shock even the most seasoned true crime fans...


]]> 480 Ashley Winstead 1728270006 Joanna 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Ashley Winstead
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216223604 The nightmare she’s running from is nothing compared to where she’s headed.

Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard.

She never arrives at her destination.

Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears.

But something isn’t right. Tegan believed she was waiting out the storm, but as time ticks by, she comes to realize she is in grave danger. This safe haven isn’t what she thought it was, and staying here may have been her most deadly mistake yet.

And now she must do whatever it takes to save herself—and her unborn child.

A gut-wrenching story of motherhood, survival, and twisted expectations, #1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden delivers a snowbound thriller that will chill you to the bone.
]]> 384 Freida McFadden 1464232989 Joanna 0 to-read 3.58 2025
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 213243915 The #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books so many love, brings us a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is . . . complicated. So when her real dad—a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago—suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach about love, and what it actually means to be family.]]> 450 Jojo Moyes 1984879324 Joanna 0 to-read 3.88 2025
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52788874 From scream queens to femmes fatale, horror isn’t just for the boys.
Ěý
Gothic media moguls Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence, authors of The Science of Monsters, and co-hosts of the Horror Rewind podcast called “the best horror film podcast out there� by Film Daddy, present a guide to the feminist horror movies, TV shows, and characters we all know and love.
Ěý
Through interviews, film analysis, and bone-chilling discoveries, The Science of Women in Horror uncovers the theories behind women’s most iconic roles of the genre. Explore age-old tropes such as “The Innocent� like Lydia in Beetlejuice, “The Gorgon� like Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th, and “The Mother� like Norma Bates in Pyscho and Bates Motel, and delve deeper into female-forward film and TV including:
The Haunting of Hill House
Teeth
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
And so much more!
Join Kelly and Meg in The Science of Women in Horror as they flip the script and prove that every girl is a “final girl.”]]> 264 Meg Hafdahl 1510751742 Joanna 1 3.80
author: Meg Hafdahl
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:
Immediately no. You can’t write a book about women in ANYTHING when you refer to Marie Skłodowska-Curie as Marie Curie. This woman loved her country and fought for it to be recognised in her discoveries (Polonium? Poland?) and you ignore her wishes by calling her by her husband’s name erasing a huge part of her identity? Yeah, I don’t trust anything the author says moving forward and I’m not even wasting my time finishing the book.
]]> 46041199 A fierce international bestseller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,� she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.

In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.

Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning� birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo 1631496700 Joanna 4 4.17 2016
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 52845775
As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.

Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.]]> 209 Cathy Park Hong 1984820362 Joanna 0 to-read 4.20 2020
author: Cathy Park Hong
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204905217
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved.

Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran towards his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they shared in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.

To make her mother known.

This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.]]> 304 Lisa Marie Presley 0593733878 Joanna 0 to-read 4.27 2024
author: Lisa Marie Presley
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58678518
If sex is a truth-teller, Eve--a young, queer woman in Brooklyn--is looking for answers. On an evening when she is feeling particularly impulsive, she posts some nude photos of herself online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan--and soon the three begin a relationship that disturbs Eve as much as it delights her. As each act of the affair unfolds, Eve is left to ask: to whom is she responsible? And to what extent do our desires determine who we are?

In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find--or lose--ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.]]> 240 Lillian Fishman 0593243765 Joanna 0 to-read 3.08 2022
author: Lillian Fishman
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Joanna 0 to-read 3.61 2007
author: Han Kang
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58065392 Introducing a sharp-witted heroine for the 21st century: a new amateur sleuth exploring the landscape—both physical and virtual—of New York in a debut novel about love, technology, and murder.

Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency.

A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she's landed her ideal job. But when a client goes missing, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit. Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices, and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.]]> 358 Jane Pek 0593313798 Joanna 0 to-read 3.46 2022
author: Jane Pek
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62848145 As he continues showing me their incredible penthouse apartment, I have a terrible feeling about the woman behind closed doors. But I can't risk losing this job � not if I want to keep my darkest secret safe . . .

It's hard to find an employer who doesn't ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job, cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want. It's almost perfect. But I still haven't met Mrs Garrick, or seen inside the guest bedroom. I'm sure I hear her crying. I notice spots of blood around the neck of her white nightgowns when I'm doing laundry. And one day I can't help but knock on the door. When it gently swings open, what I see inside changes everything...

That's when I make a promise. After all, I've done this before. I can protect Mrs. Garrick while keeping my own secrets locked up safe. Douglas Garrick has done wrong. He is going to pay. It's simply a question of how far I'm willing to go...]]> 318 Freida McFadden 1837901317 Joanna 3
I loved the first book but this one was mid. A light read and I appreciate that. It was fun and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time so that’s a win. ]]> 4.21 2023
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves:
review:
It made me distrust the goodreads book for the year awards even more.

I loved the first book but this one was mid. A light read and I appreciate that. It was fun and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time so that’s a win.
]]> 199235727
I used to clean other people’s houses—now, I can’t believe this home is actually mine. The charming kitchen, the quiet cul-de-sac, the huge yard where my kids can play. My husband and I saved for years to give our children the life they deserve.

Even though I’m wary of our new neighbor Mrs. Lowell, when she invites us over for dinner it’s our chance to make friends. Her maid opens the door wearing a white apron, her hair in a tight bun. I know exactly what it’s like to be in her shoes.

But her cold stare gives me chills�

The Lowells� maid isn’t the only strange thing on our street. I’m sure I see a shadowy figure watching us. My husband leaves the house late at night. And when I meet a woman who lives across the way, her words chill me to the bone: Be careful of your neighbors.

Did I make a terrible mistake moving my family here?

I thought I’d left my darkest secrets behind. But could this quiet suburban street be the most dangerous place of all?]]> 364 Freida McFadden 1464223319 Joanna 0 to-read 3.79 2024
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62080187
But when they visit the remote manor that once belonged to Dr. Adrienne Hale, a renowned psychiatrist who vanished without a trace four years earlier, a violent winter storm traps them at the estate� with no chance of escape until the blizzard comes to an end.

In search of a book to keep her entertained until the snow abates, Tricia happens upon a secret room. One that contains audio transcripts from every single patient Dr. Hale has ever interviewed. As Tricia listens to the cassette tapes, she learns about the terrifying chain of events leading up to Dr. Hale’s mysterious disappearance.

Tricia plays the tapes one by one, late into the night. With each one, another shocking piece of the puzzle falls into place, and Dr. Adrienne Hale’s web of lies slowly unravels.

And then Tricia reaches the final cassette.

The one that reveals the entire horrifying truth.]]> 286 Freida McFadden Joanna 2 4.09 2022
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
review:
The plot twist was an insult to my intelligence
]]> 60556912
Every day I clean the Winchesters� beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.

I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out� and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am.

They don’t know what I’m capable of�

An unbelievably twisty read that will have you glued to the pages late into the night. Anyone who loves The Woman in the Window, The Wife Between Us and The Girl on the Train won’t be able to put this down!]]> 329 Freida McFadden 1803144378 Joanna 4 4.31 2022
author: Freida McFadden
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves:
review:
Finally a page turner this year, oh my god it was good. It’s not the most ambitious read but after suffering through books for the past few months I genuinely enjoyed it
]]> 61812427 To live and dream is a wicked dance.

My dreams often come true -- a curse, and a blessing.

Pamela Anderson's blond bombshell image was ubiquitous in the 1990s. Discovered in the stands during a Canadian football game, she was quickly launched into superstardom, becoming Playboy's favorite cover girl and an emblem of Hollywood glamour and sex appeal. Yet the Pamela Anderson we think we know was created through happenstance rather than careful cultivation. Love, Pamela brings forth her true story: that of a small-town girl getting tangled up in her own dream.

Growing up on Vancouver Island, the daughter of young, wild, and unwittingly stylish parents, Pamela lived a hardscrabble childhood but developed a deep love for nature, populating her world with misfits, apparitional friends, and injured animals. Eventually overcoming her natural shyness, Pamela's restless imagination propelled her into a life few can dream of, from the beaches of Malibu to the coveted scene at the Playboy Mansion. As her star rose, she found herself a fixture of tabloid fodder, at the height of an era when paparazzi tactics were bent on destroying a person's image and self-esteem.

Pamela forged ahead with grace, finding sanctuary in her love of art and literature, and emerged a devoted mother and activist. Now, having returned to the island of her childhood, after a memorable run starring as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway, Pamela is telling her story, a story of an irrepressible free spirit coming home and discovering herself anew at every turn. With vivid prose interspersed with bursts of original poetry, Love, Pamela is a pensive, layered, and unforgettable memoir.]]> 256 Pamela Anderson 0063226561 Joanna 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: Pamela Anderson
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798522
It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison. They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA � they don’t really count. Amber’s the only Native student in town, and Tolly’s only on the radar due to his father’s recent death.

This is all about to change.

Bodies are going to be dropping fast in this small West Texas town. For a few unbearably hot days that will resonate through the decades and even get made into a TV movie, Tolly and Amber will be famous. Notorious even. Finally, everyone will know their names.

This is Stephen Graham Jones x-raying the slasher genre, interrogating its motivations over the shoulder and in the voice of the killer itself � from a town he did some growing up in, in a year he was also seventeen.

The kills will be poignant, the jokes will hurt, and the violence will be endearing. Everything’s turned around for Tolly, for Amber � for all of Lamesa, Texas.

Be happy you weren’t there.

Be happy you’re only reading about it.]]> 373 Stephen Graham Jones 1668022249 Joanna 3 3.54 2024
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves:
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]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 AysegĂĽl Savas 163973306X Joanna 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: AysegĂĽl Savas
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Joanna 0 to-read 3.55 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> 40605223 Now a Netflix original movie, this deeply scary and intensely unnerving novel follows a couple in the midst of a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease. You will be scared. But you won’t know why�

I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.

Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.�

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.]]> 241 Iain Reid Joanna 2 3.53 2016
author: Iain Reid
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/14
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]]> 206318561 178 Eve Babitz 0394409841 Joanna 0 to-read 4.07 1977
author: Eve Babitz
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Joanna 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Coco Mellors
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/18
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]]> 61272703 A highly anticipated new novel exploring what it means to be a woman in her many forms—daughter, friend, partner, lover, and mother.

Emily writes for women’s catalogs for a living, but she’d rather be writing books. She has a handsome photographer boyfriend, but she actively wonders how and when they will eventually hurt each other. Her best work friend Megan is her lifeline, until Megan is abruptly laid off. When her world is further upended by an unplanned pregnancy, Emily is forced to make tough decisions that will change her life forever.

What will she sacrifice from her old life to make room for a new one? What fires will she be forced to extinguish, and which will keep burning? Old Flame is a story about the essential—and often existential—choices that define a woman’s life at every level, from which dress to wear to when to have a child to how to be in the world.]]> 320 Molly Prentiss 1501121588 Joanna 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Molly Prentiss
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> 53180064 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781951213145.

Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about.

Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself.

Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.]]> 240 Chelsea G. Summers Joanna 0 to-read 3.77 2019
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> 209286482 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude � a period of desire, despair and possibility � a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 447 Sally Rooney 0735281831 Joanna 0 to-read 4.05 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> 61343296 'What I learnt from sharing my most private pain with a semi-professional problem-solver was that the mere act of asking for help was, in itself, healing. It was as if I had crept down to the docks under cover of darkness and floated a message out in a bottle, imagining how it might be received. By writing it, I was acknowledging that someone might care about me; that they'd be able to say the right thing without knowing me. Because I was feeling something that other people had felt and therefore I wasn't, as I suspected, the loneliest and strangest woman in the world.'

Since early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in to her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style. Their questions range from the painfully - and sometimes hilariously - relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between.

Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures in love, friendship and dating, Dolly leads us by the hand through the various labyrinths of life, proving that a problem shared is truly a problem halved.]]> 224 Dolly Alderton 0241623642 Joanna 3 3.80 2022
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> 59823055
Still reeling in the aftermath of the deadliest war the world had ever seen, the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. Some historians believe the mysterious illness and violent hallucinations were caused by spoiled bread; others claim it was the result of covert government testing on the local population.
In that town lived a woman named Elodie. She was the baker’s wife: a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, the forceful ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet, Elodie was quickly drawn into their orbit. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse � but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory’s hall of mirrors, and an erotic fable of transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.]]> 184 Sophie Mackintosh 0385548311 Joanna 2 3.27 2023
author: Sophie Mackintosh
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
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Good writing but I found myself wishing it would end finally. I didn’t care about any of the characters unfortunately
]]> 61272288


Katy Kelleher has spent much of her life chasing beauty. As a child, she uprooted handfuls of purple, fragrant little flowers from the earth, plucked iridescent seashells from the beach, and dug for turquoise stones in her backyard. As a teenager she applied glittery shimmer to her eyelids after religiously dabbing on her signature scent of orange blossoms and jasmine. And as an adult, she coveted gleaming marble countertops and delicate porcelain to beautify her home. This obsession with beauty led her to become a home, garden, and design writer, where she studied how beautiful things are mined, grown, made, and enhanced. In researching these objects, Kelleher concluded that most of us are blind to the true cost of our desires. Because whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer, and you’ll inevitably find a shadow of decay lurking underneath.

In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods. She reveals the crushed beetle shells in our lipstick, the musk of rodents in our perfume, and the burnt cow bones baked into our dishware. She untangles the secret history of silk and muses on her problematic prom dress. She tells the story of countless workers dying in their efforts to bring us shiny rocks from unsafe mines that shatter and wound the earth, all because a diamond company created a compelling ad. She examines the enduring appeal of the beautiful dead girl and the sad fate of the ugly mollusk. With prose as stunning as the objects she describes, Kelleher invites readers to examine their own relationships with the beautiful objects that adorn their body and grace their homes.

And yet, Kelleher argues that while we have a moral imperative to understand our relationship to desire, we are not evil or weak for desiring beauty. The Ugly History of Beautiful Things opens our eyes to beauty that surrounds us, helps us understand how that beauty came to be, what price was paid and by whom, and how we can most ethically partake in the beauty of the world.]]> 271 Katy Kelleher 1982179376 Joanna 0 to-read 3.55 2023
author: Katy Kelleher
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> 111672538
Sophie Chi is in her first year at Wellesley College (despite her parents� wishes that she attend a “real� university, rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aromantic and asexual identities. Despite knowing she’ll never fall in love, she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at Wellesley. No one except her roommate knows that she’s behind the incredibly popular "Dear Wendy" account.

When Joanna “Jo� Ephron―also a first-year student at Wellesley―created their “Sincerely Wanda� account, it wasn't at all meant to be serious or take off like it does―not like Dear Wendy’s. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Dear Wendy? Oops . As if Jo’s not busy enough having existential crises over gender, the fact that she’ll never truly be loved or be enough, or her few friends finding The One and forgetting her!

While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo are getting closer in real life, bonding over their shared aroace identities. As their friendship develops and they work together to start a campus organization for other a-spec students, can their growing bond survive if they learn just who’s behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

With its exploration of a-spec identities, college life, and more, this platonic comedy, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Half of It and Alice Oseman’s Loveless , is ultimately a love story about two people who are not―and will not―be in love!]]> 368 Ann Zhao 1250885000 Joanna 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Ann Zhao
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/15
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]]> 208580608 The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,� writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it. Grieving Pierre’s untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in �ve’s later recollection, “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.�

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.]]> 318 Dava Sobel 0802163823 Joanna 1 3.94 2024
author: Dava Sobel
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 1
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date added: 2024/09/10
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Imagine naming your discovery polonium to honour your homeland just for people to blatantly ignore it after your death while making money off of your life story.
]]> 207567691 From the acclaimed author ofĚýAmerican ComicsĚýandĚýJewish ComedyĚýcomes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror inĚýAmerican literature, cinema, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele

America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in each of our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.

In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United States, drawing a surprising through-line between the lingering influence of the European Gothic, the enslaved insurrection tales propagated by slaveholders, and the apocryphal chronicles of colonial settlers kidnapped by Native Americans, among many others.

These foundational narratives give rise to and are influenced by the body of work we more closely associate with the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, the lingering stories of Shirley Jackson, the unsettling films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night tales of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. From “The Tell-Tale Heart� to M3gan, we begin to see why the horror genre is the perfect prism through which to view America’s past and present.

With the extraordinary historical breadth and dexterous weave of insight and style that has made him twice a finalist for the National Jewish Book, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.
Ěý
Featuring cameos
Shirley Jackson â€� The Sixth Sense â€� ĚýEdgar Allan Poe â€� Nathaniel Hawthorne â€� Anne Radcliffe â€� Charles Brockden Brown â€� Los Espookys â€� Washington Irving â€� Nat Turner â€� ĚýNight of the Living Dead â€� H.P. Lovecraft â€� Alien â€� Mary Heaton Vorse â€� Edith Wharton â€� Norman Bates â€� Lon Chaney â€� Frankenstein â€� Dracula â€� H.G. Wells â€� William Faulkner â€� Dashiell Hammett â€� Tananarive Due â€� Twilight Zone â€� The Handmaid’s Tale â€� Ray Bradbury â€� I Am Legend â€� Elia Kazan â€� Psycho â€� Ralph Ellison â€� The Blair Witch Project â€� Stanley Kubrick â€� Helter Skelter â€� Jordan Peele â€� The Walking Dead â€� H.H. Holmes â€� Harriet Beecher Stowe]]> 480 Jeremy Dauber 1643753568 Joanna 0 to-read 3.62 2024
author: Jeremy Dauber
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 205673392 In this atmospheric Appalachian gothic, the Haddesley siblings of West Virginia must unearth long-buried secrets to carve out a future when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.� Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.

Brimming with aching loss and the universal struggle between honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one’s own, The Bog Wife is a haunting invocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bound us.]]> 336 Kay Chronister 1640096620 Joanna 0 to-read 3.59 2024
author: Kay Chronister
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 203956643 A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors� (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”]]> 257 Mariana Enríquez 0593733258 Joanna 0 to-read 3.80 2024
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Joanna 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.Ěý

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Joanna 0 to-read 3.46 2025
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 198137722 Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?


When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie's former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the aritsts into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to to pursue their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.]]> 352 Emma Copley Eisenberg 0593242238 Joanna 0 to-read 3.52 2024
author: Emma Copley Eisenberg
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203469691
It is already a haven of tranquility and reflection for locals, but when someone leaves a notebook behind, the laundromat becomes a place that brings people together. One by one, customers start jotting down candid diary entries, opening their hearts and inviting acts of kindness from neighbours who were once just faces in the crowd.

But there is more to the diary than first appears, and before long the laundromat's regulars are teaming up to solve a mystery and help the notebook's former owner find peace.]]> 320 Kim Jiyun 1529437431 Joanna 0 to-read 3.93 2023
author: Kim Jiyun
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> 60741808 An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.]]> 304 Daisy Alpert Florin 1250857031 Joanna 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Daisy Alpert Florin
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/04
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]]> 3547311
2 Audio CDs / 2 Hours 30 mins

~]]> 120 Richard Matheson 0061726354 Joanna 2 3.91 2009
author: Richard Matheson
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
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]]> 42870948
Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, salt slow considers characters in motion � turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely.

Winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, Armfield is a writer of sharp, lyrical prose and tilting dark humour � salt slow marks the arrival of an ambitious and singular new voice.]]> 193 Julia Armfield 1529012562 Joanna 0 to-read 3.99 2019
author: Julia Armfield
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 127306444
IĂ°unn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.

When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same � have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.

Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . .

What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?]]> 197 Hildur Knútsdóttir 1250322049 Joanna 0 to-read 3.30 2021
author: Hildur KnĂştsdĂłttir
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201033505 From Eliza Clark, the author of the brilliant novels Boy Parts and Penance and one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, comes a fierce, visionary and darkly comic story collection.

A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.

A teenager longs for perfect skin.

A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.

A young man takes the night into his own hands.

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.]]> 240 Eliza Clark 0063393263 Joanna 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Eliza Clark
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Joanna 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Joanna 0 to-read 3.66 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Joanna 0 to-read 3.31 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Joanna 0 to-read 3.49 2024
author: Helen Phillips
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
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]]> 13082435 88 Clarice Lispector 0811219909 Joanna 2 4.33 1973
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/19
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]]> 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Joanna 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box
Ěý
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’sĚýMommy,ĚýDaddo,Ěýand Grandma Ruth.ĚýBut there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”ĚýĚ�
Ěý
When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.Ěý
Ěý
Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.ĚýĚý
Ěý
But Other Mommy needs an answer.Ěý
Ěý
Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]> 367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Joanna 0 to-read 3.61 2024
author: Josh Malerman
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25167654
What happens to your Declaration after you leave the island is none of your concern.

From the monsters of Ancient Greece to the atrocities of World War II, from heroes to villains with their seers and sidekicks by their sides, Skein Island looks through the roles we play, and how they form and divide us. Powerful and disturbing, it is a story over which the characters will fight for control.

Until they realise the true enemy is the story itself.]]> 200 Aliya Whiteley 1907133852 Joanna 0 to-read 3.28 2015
author: Aliya Whiteley
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/10
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]]> 195703882 Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying� yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 278 Monika Kim 1645661237 Joanna 0 to-read 3.82 2024
author: Monika Kim
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Joanna 0 currently-reading 3.94 1970
author: Joan Didion
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/20
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 26883528 Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power

Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years.

Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless.]]> 218 Deborah Levy 1620406691 Joanna 0 to-read 3.49 2015
author: Deborah Levy
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/20
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]]> 17329120 109 Deborah Levy 1907903631 Joanna 0 to-read 4.13 2014
author: Deborah Levy
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/20
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]]> 90872
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.]]> 163 Lorrie Moore 0307277291 Joanna 0 to-read 4.13 1985
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/20
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]]> 201626940 FromĚýNew York TimesĚýbestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven exposĂ© of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem—and the women who have paid the price for our obsession with Camelot

The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake. Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact.

Now, in Ask Not, bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys� hidden history of violence and exploitation, laying bare their unrepentant sexism and rampant depravity while also restoring these women and girls to their rightful place at the center of the dynasty’s story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Martha Moxley, Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren’t nearly as well known but should be.

Drawing on years of explosive reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled family and a consequential part of American history that is still very much with us. At long last Callahan redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys� orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves and giving voice to those who, through no fault of their own, could not.]]> 400 Maureen Callahan 0316276170 Joanna 0 to-read 4.04 2024
author: Maureen Callahan
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61672
La villa est magnifique, l'été brûlant, la Méditerranée toute proche. Cécile a dix-sept ans. Elle ne connaît de l'amour que des baisers, des rendez-vous, des lassitudes. Pas pour longtemps. Son père, veuf, est un adepte joyeux des liaisons passagères et sans importance. Ils s'amusent, ils n'ont besoin de personne, ils sont heureux. La visite d'une femme de cœur, intelligente et calme, vient troubler ce délicieux désordre. Comment écarter la menace ? Dans la pinède embrasée, un jeu cruel se prépare.
C'était l'été 1954. On entendait pour la première fois la voix sèche et rapide d'un « charmant petit monstre » qui allait faire scandale. la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle commençait. Elle serait à l'image de cette adolescente déchirée entre le remords et le culte du plaisir.

Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father's love life leads to tragic consequences.

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences.

The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager's attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.]]> 154 Françoise Sagan 2266127748 Joanna 4 3.76 1954
author: Françoise Sagan
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/07/17
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reading this while heat wave is heat waving in Europe with Clairo’s new album in the background was truly the relaxing experience I needed
]]> 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 208 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 Joanna 0 to-read 4.22 1995
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 177148776 128 Anne de Marcken 0811237850 Joanna 0 to-read 3.70 2024
author: Anne de Marcken
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45967 The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.]]> 148 Sadegh Hedayat 0802131808 Joanna 0 to-read 4.02 1937
author: Sadegh Hedayat
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 471809
Here he meets Nathalie, the wife of a country lawyer. She falls deeply in love with him, a passion to which he soon responds. But back in Paris her innate goodness contrasts oddly with the frivolity of Gilles’s life. Soon it seems as if their relationship is doomed, as if their happiness is a mere gleam of sunlight on cold water…”]]> 144 Françoise Sagan 0140035877 Joanna 0 to-read 3.89 1969
author: Françoise Sagan
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61812422 New York Times BestsellerĚý

The long-awaited next book from actress and New York Times bestselling author of The Rural Diaries, Hilarie Burton Morgan. Through memoir essays and magical practices, Grimoire Girl connects us to the enchantment that exists inside us all.

Since childhood, Hilarie Burton Morgan has felt the call to record, keep, and catalogue life in all its strange wonder. It was a whimsical habit, with no clear goal. And then, when she became a mother, the importance of all that collecting snapped into focus.Ěý

In an effort to patchwork together an anthology of traditions, curiosity, and magical thinking that she could pass down, Burton Morgan realized she was crafting a grimoire.Ěý

In her most intimate book yet, Burton Morgan shares how she’s creating an inheritance of mischief and magic that will outlive her. What’s more, she shows readers how they too can look at the elements of their lives and collect the pieces into a tangible collection of a lifetime of learning. Because in its purest form, a grimoire was a guide to keep you alive.

Like the grimoires of old, full of life-saving wisdom, these pages record the people, places, ideas and habits that have kept Burton Morgan alive, in her signature voice that is at once honest, witty, and charming. Accompanied by whimsical two-color illustrations by Olivia Faust, the book also includes Simple Spells, which are ways to bring magic into your daily create an altar that delights and inspires, practice candle magic and poetry spells, make an oracle deck, or channel your inner kitchen witch with recipes and potions.

So begin creating your own inheritance, take a long look inward and decide...

What wisdom will be written on the pages of your Grimoire?]]> 222 Hilarie Burton Morgan 0063222760 Joanna 0 to-read 4.19 2023
author: Hilarie Burton Morgan
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201036078
Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession. But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother’s affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.]]> 336 Genevieve Jagger 1912489961 Joanna 0 to-read 3.50 2024
author: Genevieve Jagger
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 50042494
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]> 352 Dolly Alderton 0241434548 Joanna 0 to-read 3.86 2020
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60906865
The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a four-year period on tour and after losing loved ones and peers to overdose, Dupuis funneled complicated grief into harm reduction advocacy, working to fundraise for and distribute overdose prevention resources in venues internationally.

The slick performativity of pop, punk humor, electronic glitch and sampling, and the surprising leaps of improvisation influence these poems, but beyond music, these poems are informed by Dupuis’s larger concerns about justice and organizing. Cry Perfume is a hopeful but realistic inventory of the virtues and evils that emerge when arts and tech collide. Those dualities are cloaked in the same sparkling fragrance, and there are twinned pleasures and regrets in parting the smokescreen.]]> 112 Sadie Dupuis 1939568625 Joanna 0 to-read 3.55 2023
author: Sadie Dupuis
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Joanna 0 to-read 3.46 2023
author: Melissa Broder
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443441
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother—a newly devout Messianic Jew—starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other’s lives—must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 304 Alexandra Tanner 1668018616 Joanna 0 to-read 3.32 2024
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: Joanna
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/14
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]]> 196915235 Every serial killer needs a friend.
Every game must have a winner.

When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, the two find something elusive—the friendship of a like-minded, pitch-black soul. From small town West Virginia to upscale California, from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country. But as their friendship develops into something more, the restless ghosts left in their wake are only a few steps behind, ready to claim more than just their newfound love. Can Rowan and Sloane dig themselves out of a game of graves? Or have they finally met their match?

Butcher & Blackbird is the first book in the Ruinous Love Dark Romance trilogy of interconnected stand-alone dark romantic comedies. This dual POV novel ends on a HEA.]]> 355 Brynne Weaver Joanna 0 currently-reading 4.14 2023
author: Brynne Weaver
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/12
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review:

]]> 38359036 °ŐäłŮ´Ç·Éľ±±đ°ů±đ°ů (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.

Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.

One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.

A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions.]]> 272 Heather Morris 006287067X Joanna 1
Don’t feel attacked if you like it now. Just read up on it and if your opinion doesn’t change then it’s your right. ]]> 4.32 2018
author: Heather Morris
name: Joanna
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
Disrespectful to the people who were affected by Auschwitz. Do your research before reading the book, look up the controversies and then decide if you want to financially support the author and promote this by giving it more than one star.

Don’t feel attacked if you like it now. Just read up on it and if your opinion doesn’t change then it’s your right.
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