en-US Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:05:27 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 217896244
Meanwhile, Alison’s first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel’s beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).

As the TV showĚýDeath and TaxidermyĚýracks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison’s Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison’s own envy spirals.ĚýWhy couldn’t she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…likeĚýQueer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?

Spent’s rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what’s true about life in the world at this moment, before it’s too late—once again proves that “nobody does it better� (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.]]> 272 Alison Bechdel 0063278928 Leigh 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214488980 Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.
Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).
Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby.]]> 272 E.M. Forster 0571388183 Leigh 0 to-read 4.20 1971
author: E.M. Forster
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213344068
One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants - some of whom have barely spoken to each other - become real neighbours. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editor Margaret Atwood, Authors Guild president Douglas Preston, and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn't get away from the city when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the horrible loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.

Includes writing from:
Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, Celeste Ng, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Diana Gabaldon, Ishmael Reed, Meg Wolitzer, Luis Alberto Urrea, James Shapiro, Sylvia Day, Mary Pope Osborne, Monique Truong, Hampton Sides, R. L. Stine, Scott Turow, Tommy Orange, and more!]]> 384 Margaret Atwood 0063280183 Leigh 0 to-read 3.52 2024
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220160188 From the author of the international bestseller Lie with Me comes the tale of an affair between an aristocratic teenager and a soldier, as they discover the possibilities and perils of first love.

Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light. As he’s taken under Marcel’s wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about.

In this stunning portrait of young love, Philippe Besson depicts a young man who plays by his own rules and is not afraid of who he is. In the afternoons, Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city’s opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together. Their affair initiates them into a world of pleasure and shields them from the encroaching war. During this magical week away from the trenches, Vincent shelters Arthur with happiness, reassuring him, “Nothing will happen to you.�

Tender and harrowing, In the Absence of Men captures how exhilarating and heart-crushing it is to fall in love for the first time. Besson’s award-winning novel “beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth� (The Independent).]]> 176 Philippe Besson 1668089823 Leigh 0 to-read 3.78 2001
author: Philippe Besson
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 590234 256 Gordon Merrick 1555832903 Leigh 0 3.75 1970
author: Gordon Merrick
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: to-read, 1950-1974, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 905927 256 Keith Hale 141965991X Leigh 0 3.94 1983
author: Keith Hale
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read, 1975-1999, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 28186399 Library of America edition of her works.

The Complete Orsinia gathers for the first time the entire body of work set in the imaginary central European nation of Orsinia: the early novel Malafrena, begun in the 1950s but not published until 1979, the related stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976), and additional stories and songs. In a new introduction written for this volume, Le Guin describes the breakthrough that led to her first novel: “Most of what I read drew me to write about Europe; but I knew it was foolhardy to write fiction set in Europe if I’d never been there. At last it occurred to me that I might get away with it by writing about a part of Europe where nobody had been but me.� So Orsinia was established, a country, like its near neighbors Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, with a long and vivid history of oppression, art, and revolution.

An epic meditation on the meaning of hope and freedom, love and duty, Malafrena takes place from 1825 to 1830, when Orsinia is a part of the Austrian empire. Itale Sorde, the idealistic heir to Val Malafrena, an estate in the rural western provinces, leaves home against his father’s wishes to work as a journalist in the cosmopolitan capital city of Krasnoy, where he plays an integral part in the revolutionary politics that are roiling Europe.

Thirteen additional stories trace the history of Orsinia from the twelfth century, when it first emerges as an independent kingdom, to 1989, when its repressive Stalinist government falls in an Orsinian Velvet Revolution. The poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province,� Le Guin’s first published work, joins two never before published songs in the Orsinian language.

The volume also features a newly researched chronology of Le Guin’s life and career, and detailed notes. The beautiful full-color endpaper map of Orsinia is drawn by Le Guin herself.]]> 592 Ursula K. Le Guin 1598534939 Leigh 0 4.04 2016
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: currently-reading, format-collected-works, format-omnibus-editions, genre-novels, genre-poetry, genre-short-stories, location-out-from-library, ownership-library-books
review:

]]> 53325342 Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century; her final novel, Fledgling; and her collected short stories.

In Kindred, Dana, a Black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre–Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own. Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.

A woman wakes up covered in burns in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened to her. In time she discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her. Among the long-lived Ina, though, Shori is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her brown skin and the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Part murder mystery, part fantasy thriller, Fledgling is Butler’s incomparable take on the vampire novel.

This Library of America volume also includes eight short stories and five essays—including two previously uncollected—as well as a newly researched chronology of Butler’s life and career and helpful explanatory notes by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler’s friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.]]> 789 Octavia E. Butler 1598536753 Leigh 0 4.57 2021
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: currently-reading, format-collected-works, format-omnibus-editions, genre-essays, genre-novels, genre-sff, genre-short-stories, location-out-from-library, ownership-library-books
review:

]]> 47161 This volume—Volume C, the third out of five—covers American literature from 1820 to 1865.]]> 1069 Nina Baym 0393978990 Leigh 3 4.17 2007
author: Nina Baym
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2009/01/01
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: format-anthologies, genre-short-stories, genre-novels, genre-poetry, ownership-library-books, 1850-1899, 1900-1924
review:

]]> 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Leigh 0 3.93 2024
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Leigh 0 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: to-read, 1975-1999, genre-academic-and-campus-fiction, genre-novels
review:

]]> 19107 The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, deeply influenced later Russian literature with powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes by Ronald Wilks, and an introduction by Robert A. Maguire.

This volume includes a selection of Gogol's most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A hilarious and biting political satire, 'The Government Inspector' has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play ever written. The stories gathered here, meanwhile, range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include 'Diary of a Madman', an amusing but disturbing exploration of insanity; 'Nevsky Prospect', a depiction of an artist infatuated with a prostitute; and 'The Overcoat', a moving consideration of poverty.

Edited and translated by Ronald Wilks, this new collection of Gogol's shorter writings skilfully captures the savage wit of the original works. Robert Maguire's introduction considers recurrent themes and explores Gogol's influence on realism. This edition also includes detailed notes, a publishing history for each story and a chronology.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) was born in the Ukraine. His experience of St Petersburg life informed a savagely satirical play, The Government Inspector, and a series of brilliant short stories including Nevsky Prospekt and Diary of a Madman. For over a decade, Gogol laboured on his comic epic Dead Souls - before renouncing literature and burning parts of the manuscript shortly before he died.

If you enjoyed The Diary of a Madman, you might like Anton Chekhov's The Steppe and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Classics.

'Everything he started to imagine transformed itself and began to wriggle with life'
A.S. Byatt, author of Possession]]> 330 Nikolai Gogol 0140449078 Leigh 3 4.15 1835
author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1835
rating: 3
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: genre-short-stories, _russian-lit, assigned-undergrad, 1800-1849
review:

]]> 32572 The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is part of the Barnes & Noble ClassicsĚýseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
Biographies of the authors
Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
Footnotes and endnotes
Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
Comments by other famous authors
Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
Bibliographies for further reading
Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.



Ěý
Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the world’s most widely read and discussed authors. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern man’s anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafka’s masterpiece, �The Metamorphosis,� a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. �The Judgment,� which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and �The Stoker,� which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with �The Metamorphosis,� form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,� and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.

Also included are �In the Penal Colony,� a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and �A Hunger Artist,� about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.

Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.]]> 191 Franz Kafka 1593081804 Leigh 3 3.94 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: genre-short-stories, _german-lit, assigned-high-school, 1900-1924
review:

]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naĂŻve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TłÜ°ů˛Ô±đ»ĺ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Leigh 2 4.05 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: genre-short-stories, 1850-1899
review:

]]> 143465
]]> 144 Leo Tolstoy Leigh 3 3.95 2014
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: genre-short-stories, _russian-lit, assigned-undergrad, 1850-1899
review:
Best of the bunch: "The Death of Ivan Ilych." Dismally effective.
]]> 92250
The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.]]> 119 Tony Kushner 1559360615 Leigh 5 4.27 1993
author: Tony Kushner
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: genre-drama, subject-queer, won-pulitzer-prize, won-tony-award, rating-five-stars, subject-aids-hiv, won-lambda-literary-award, 1975-1999, saw-film, own-film
review:

]]> 1022026 416 Julia Cameron 1585424943 Leigh 0 3.45 2006
author: Julia Cameron
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, genre-nonfiction
review:

]]> 201345 376 Brian Jacques 0441001866 Leigh 3 4.16 1993
author: Brian Jacques
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: subject-animals, genre-novels, genre-children-and-young-adult, 1975-1999
review:

]]> 199798061 Featuring a new introduction by Ken Liu, this revised edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first full-length collection of essays covers her background as a writer and educator, on fantasy and science fiction, on writing, and on the future of literary science fiction.

“We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks to the language of the night.� —Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator. The book and each thematic section are brilliantly introduced and contextualized by Susan Wood, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a literary editor and feminist activist during the 1960s and �70s.

A fascinating, intimate look into the exceptional mind of Le Guin whose insights remain as relevant and resonant today as when they were first published.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin 1668034905 Leigh 0 to-read 4.38 1979
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18893115 662 Robert Penn Warren Leigh 0 to-read 4.24 1946
author: Robert Penn Warren
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1946
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59366193 All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.]]> 384 Mona Awad 1982169672 Leigh 0 3.78 2021
author: Mona Awad
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-backstage-fiction, genre-novels
review:

]]> 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Leigh 0 4.36 2024
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-short-stories
review:

]]> 43425927 0 Sally Mann Romano Leigh 0 4.58
author: Sally Mann Romano
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.58
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, genre-nonfiction, subject-music
review:

]]> 32829874 A Queer Love Story presents the first fifteen years of letters between Jane Rule --- novelist and the first widely recognized "public lesbian" in North America --- and Rick BĂ©bout, journalist and editor with the Toronto-based Body Politic, an important incubator of LGBT thought and activism. Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island, British Columbia, but wrote a column for the magazine. BĂ©bout resided in and was devoted to Toronto's gay village. Both were transplanted Americans. At turns poignant, scintillating, and incisive, their exchanges include ruminations on queer life and the writing life even as they document some of the most pressing LGBT issues of the '80s and '90s, including HIV/AIDs, censorship, and state policing of desire.]]> 650 Marilyn R. Schuster 0774835435 Leigh 0 to-read, subject-queer 4.64
author: Marilyn R. Schuster
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.64
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves: to-read, subject-queer
review:

]]> 58311985
One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants - some of whom have barely spoken to each other - become real neighbours. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editor Margaret Atwood, Authors Guild president Douglas Preston, and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn't get away from the city when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the horrible loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.

Includes writing from:
Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, Celeste Ng, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Diana Gabaldon, Ishmael Reed, Meg Wolitzer, Luis Alberto Urrea, James Shapiro, Sylvia Day, Mary Pope Osborne, Monique Truong, Hampton Sides, R. L. Stine, Scott Turow, Tommy Orange, and more!]]> 363 Margaret Atwood 0358616387 Leigh 0 3.14 2024
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/07
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, genre-short-stories
review:

]]> 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Leigh 0 3.98 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/06
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 34273725 224 Eileen Myles 0802127096 Leigh 0 3.54 2017
author: Eileen Myles
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/06
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves
review:

]]> 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Leigh 0 3.98 2018
author: Tommy Orange
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, _native-american-lit, genre-novels
review:

]]> 53290204
As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble, letting in the phantom that hungers for him.]]> 372 Lee Mandelo 125079028X Leigh 0 3.80 2021
author: Lee Mandelo
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-academic-and-campus-fiction, genre-ghost-horror-paranormal, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 134914064 168 Victor Heringer 1908670789 Leigh 0 3.79 2016
author: Victor Heringer
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/27
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer, _brazilian-lit
review:

]]> 58341029
The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisisĚýthrough direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love andĚýgrief.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.

Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill� poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Gran Fury and ACT UP’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.]]> 432 Jack Lowery 1645036588 Leigh 0 4.50 2022
author: Jack Lowery
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-aids-hiv
review:

]]> 54359512 Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.]]> 80 Etel Adnan 1643620304 Leigh 0 to-read, genre-nonfiction 4.29 2020
author: Etel Adnan
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction
review:

]]> 200835 Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege, Sitt Marie Rose, is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the Civil War in Lebanon. It reveals the tribal mentality which makes the Middle East a dangerous powerhouse. It constitutes a new narrative form and is already a classic of war literature. It won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into ten languages.

]]> 106 Etel Adnan 094299633X Leigh 0 4.10 1977
author: Etel Adnan
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: to-read, 1975-1999, genre-novels, _lebanese-lit
review:

]]> 2512273
Franky was a streetwise carny, a Bozo, the best in the business.

Patch was his partner-in-con. The two boys shared everything. Money, a berth, the risks of the road, women.

Until Donna showed up -- and they tried to share love.

Filmed in 1980 starring Jodie Foster, Robbie Robertson & Gary Busey.]]> 220 Tom Baum 0515054313 Leigh 0 3.81 1980
author: Tom Baum
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: to-read, genre-screenplays-and-novelizations, subject-film-and-television, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 701724
Washington, D.C., in the early 1950 a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Into this fevered city steps Timothy Laughlin, a recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim’s first job in D.C. and–after Fuller’s advances–his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives� in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit and intrigue, and clinging to the friendship of a beautiful young woman named Mary Johnson, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions, his love for God, and his love for Fuller–an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.

Moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star , the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO’s front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is energized by high political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak. It is Thomas Mallon’s most accomplished and daring novel to date.]]> 356 Thomas Mallon 0375423486 Leigh 0 3.56 2007
author: Thomas Mallon
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 23492483
Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 288 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 1501106473 Leigh 0 to-read 3.73 2009
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 176443585
In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that homosexuality, which is a crime at the time, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage, there is a third John has a lover, a working-class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry. John and Catherine have three grown daughters and a long, settled marriage, over the course of which Catherine has tried to accept her husband’s sexuality and her own role in life; Henry and Edith’s marriage is intended to be a revolution in itself, an intellectual partnership that dismantles the traditional understanding of what matrimony means.

Shortly before the book is to be published, Oscar Wilde is arrested. John and Henry must decide whether to go on, risking social ostracism and imprisonment, or to give up the project for their own safety and the safety of the people they love.

A richly detailed, powerful, and visceral novel about love, sex, and the struggle for a better world, The New Life brilliantly “What’s worth jeopardizing in the name or progress?� ( The New York Times Book Review , Editors� Choice).]]> 416 Tom Crewe 1668000849 Leigh 0 3.67 2023
author: Tom Crewe
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer
review:

]]> 13274939 431 C.J. Cherryh 1101554746 Leigh 0 to-read 4.02 1994
author: C.J. Cherryh
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1075283
Virginia Spencer Carr brings her own sharply focused biographer's eye to the introduction, further illuminating the story and the superb critical essays that it provokes. The casebook includes the authoritative text of the story itself, Porter's own statement regarding the genesis of this highly acclaimed work, an important interview, a collection of significant essays on "Flowering Judas" and the historical, cultural, and personal milieu from which the tale evolved, a bibliography, and a chronology of Porter's life and work.]]> 216 Katherine Anne Porter 0813519799 Leigh 0 3.46 2011
author: Katherine Anne Porter
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves: genre-short-stories, 1925-1949, to-read
review:

]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Leigh 0 3.98 1962
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: to-read, genre-novels, _russian-lit, 1950-1974
review:

]]> 53068 280 Neil Jordan 0679748342 Leigh 0 3.82 1993
author: Neil Jordan
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: genre-screenplays-and-novelizations, genre-short-stories, bought-at-bibliohead, _irish-lit, 1975-1999, location-in-sf, currently-reading, won-guardian-fiction-prize
review:

]]> 38738 The Best of James Herriot is one of the most extraordinary volumes ever devoted to the work and world of a contemporary writer. Within its covers are unforgettable episodes from the remarkable series of memoirs that began with All Creatures Great and Small-"the ones my family and I have laughed at over the years and the ones my readers have said they most enjoyed," as Herriot, himself, put it. Yet the book is far more than a simple anthology: Its gorgeous pages also include hundreds of line drawings and color photographs, capturing Herriot's Yorkshire in a worthy complement to the writer's words.

The 1991 publication of Every Living Thing, rendered the original edition of this book incomplete. This fall will mark the publication of the complete, definitive edition with the addition of five of his best, more recent stories, as well as new art. Once again The Best of James Herriot becomes the quintessential Herriot volume-one of those invaluable books that will be loved as much in decades to come as it is today.

]]> 543 James Herriot 0312192363 Leigh 4 4.58 1983
author: James Herriot
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: subject-animals, genre-nonfiction, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-veterinary-medicine
review:

]]> 1303608 twentieth century for their ancient purposes." Thus Michael Cox introduces The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories , a unique collection of 33 of the best and most chilling ghost stories of our era.
The first anthology to trace the evolution of the ghost story over the last one hundred years, this book demonstrates the variety and versatility of the genre and the different ways in which stories of the supernatural have adapted to twentieth-century venues and concerns. In these tales we
encounter not only the returning dead, but also distinctly modern a haunted typewriter, a ghost that travels by train, and an urban specter made of smoke and soot. There are child ghosts and haunted houses, playful spooks and deadly apparitions. The authors of these uncanny tales are as
diverse as the kinds of stories they tell; there are ghost stories by such specialists as M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood and many by authors not commonly associated with the F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, A.S. Byatt, and Angela Carter are only a few of the literary
celebrities included in this collection. At a time when our era seems to grow increasingly rational and predictable, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories reminds us of the joys of uncertainty and wonder. Distinctive and gripping, these stories will linger long
in the memory.]]> 425 Michael Cox 0192142607 Leigh 4 3.93 1996
author: Michael Cox
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2010/05/01
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves: format-anthologies, ownership-library-books, genre-ghost-horror-paranormal, 1900-1924, 1925-1949, 1950-1974, 1975-1999
review:

]]> 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Leigh 0 3.75 2022
author: Julia Armfield
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels
review:

]]> 16158147 Village Voice in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists. As a critic, curator, journalist, and scholar, Rich has been inextricably linked to the New Queer Cinema from its inception. This volume presents her new thoughts on the topic, as well as bringing together the best of her writing on the NQC. She follows this cinematic movement from its origins in the mid-1980s all the way to the present in essays and articles directed at a range of audiences, from readers of academic journals to popular glossies and weekly newspapers. She presents her insights into such NQC pioneers as Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien and investigates such celebrated films as Go Fish, Brokeback Mountain, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and Milk. In addition to exploring less-known films and international cinemas (including Latin American and French films and videos), she documents the more recent incarnations of the NQC on screen, on the web, and in art galleries.]]> 360 B. Ruby Rich 0822354284 Leigh 0 4.13 2013
author: B. Ruby Rich
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/11
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-film-and-television, subject-queer
review:

]]> 59948520 A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.

It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 382 Alice Winn 0593534565 Leigh 0 4.51 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/08
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, subject-queer, subject-war, subject-war-wwi
review:

]]> 3930862 160 Bruno Vogel 0854491554 Leigh 0 4.28 2003
author: Bruno Vogel
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/08
shelves: to-read, 1925-1949, genre-novels, subject-queer, subject-war, subject-war-wwi
review:

]]> 32806547
In 1966 There Was� the sell-out tour to end all tours. Bob Dylan and the Hawks found themselves at the epicentre of a storm of controversy. Their response? To unleash a cavalcade of ferocity from Melbourne to Manchester, from Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall. For the first time, the full story can now be told from eye-witnesses galore; from timely reports, both mile wide and spot on; and from the participants themselves. And what better tour guide than Clinton Heylin, the esteemed Dylan biographer and one of the world’s leading rock historians. The price of admission? Thirty pieces of silver. The password? Play f***ing loud.

'The definitive written account of Dylan’s historic and pivotal 1965-66 world tours.'
� Bobdylan.com

'British writer-historian Heylin is perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan.'
� Rolling Stone]]> 320 Clinton Heylin Leigh 0 4.02
author: Clinton Heylin
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-music
review:

]]> 28458500 Book by Hawkins, Ronnie 314 Ronnie Hawkins 077372298X Leigh 0 3.67 1989
author: Ronnie Hawkins
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-music, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 139569
Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town.

Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and politics while portraying an extraordinary protagonist full of longing, vulnerability, and working-class grit. This once-underground classic takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of gender transformation and exploration and ultimately speaks to the heart of anyone who has ever suffered or gloried in being different.

Dear Reader:
I want to let you know that Stone Butch Blues is an anti-oppression/s novel.
As a result, it contains scenes of rape and other violence.
None of this violence is gratuitous or salacious.
Leslie]]> 308 Leslie Feinberg 1555838537 Leigh 3 4.52 1993
author: Leslie Feinberg
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves: subject-queer, won-lambda-literary-award, won-stonewall-book-award, genre-novels, 1975-1999, ownership-to-acquire
review:

]]> 86062 A comical and poignant memoir of a gay man living life as he pleased in the 1930s

In 1931, gay liberation was not a movement—it was simply unthinkable. But in that year, Quentin Crisp made the courageous decision to "come out" as a homosexual. This exhibitionist with the henna-dyed hair was harassed, ridiculed and beaten. Nevertheless, he claimed his right to be himself—whatever the consequences. The Naked Civil Servant is both a comic masterpiece and a unique testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
]]> 212 Quentin Crisp 0141180536 Leigh 0 4.06 1968
author: Quentin Crisp
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-queer
review:

]]> 625419 229 Philip O'Connor 0393027635 Leigh 0 3.00 1958
author: Philip O'Connor
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir
review:

]]> 16241141 A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and �80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.

After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child.

Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference.

In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create.

Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.

It has been named a Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Honor Book for 2014.]]> 326 Alysia Abbott 0393082520 Leigh 0 4.01 2013
author: Alysia Abbott
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/14
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-queer, subject-san-francisco, subject-aids-hiv
review:

]]> 60707834 232 Joyce Chopra 0872868680 Leigh 0 3.73
author: Joyce Chopra
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.73
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/14
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-film-and-television
review:

]]> 116297
Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16-year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her six-week residency requirement she meets Ann Childs, a casino worker and fifteen years her junior. Physically, they are remarkably alike and eventually have an affair and begin the struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women can last. Desert of the Heart examines the conflict between convention and freedom and the ways in which the characters try to resolve the conflict.]]> 216 Jane Rule 159493035X Leigh 0 3.92 1964
author: Jane Rule
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/11
shelves: to-read, 1950-1974, genre-novels, saw-film, subject-queer
review:

]]> 60012535 Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent work of imagination, a visionary, genre-crossing story about a future utopian community on the Northern California coast. A masterly, hypnotic and her most consistently lyric and luminous book. This new edition includes an introduction by Shruti Swamy, author of A House is a Body.

Midway through her career, Ursula K. Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song,ĚýAlways Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictionalĚýethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.

Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations� that illuminate individual lives, including a woman named Stone Telling, who travels beyond the Valley and comes to reside with another tribe, the patriarchal Condor people.

With sharp poignancy, Le Guin explores the complexities of the Kesh’s unified society and presents to us—in exquisite detail—their lives, histories, adventures, customs, language, and art.Ěý In addition to poems and folk tales, Le Guin created verse dramas, records of oral performances, recipes, and even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. The novel is illustrated throughout with drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and includes a musical component—original recordings of Kesh songs that Le Guin collaborated on with composer Todd Barton—bringing this utterly original and compelling world to life.]]> 640 Ursula K. Le Guin 0358726921 Leigh 0 to-read 4.18 1985
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 274186 here.

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.� But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness� and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.]]> 245 Kazuo Ishiguro 0679731725 Leigh 5 4.17 1989
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/16
shelves: genre-novels, won-booker-prize, rating-five-stars, 1975-1999
review:

]]> 1318433 192 Adam Mars-Jones 0679759603 Leigh 0 3.66 1993
author: Adam Mars-Jones
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/12
shelves: to-read, 1975-1999, genre-novels, subject-aids-hiv, subject-queer
review:

]]> 4395 The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics.]]> 455 John Steinbeck Leigh 0 3.88 1939
author: John Steinbeck
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, genre-novels, won-pulitzer-prize, 1925-1949, location-in-sf
review:
Okay, confession: I've never read this book from beginning to end. Someday it'll happen.
]]> 1291581
As fledgling artists in their respective fields, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter were enthusiastic collaborators in a unique art form, the livre d'artiste � the marriage of original graphic work with literary text. Beginning in the mid-sixties, while both were still students, they worked together on five limited-edition handmade books, volumes of Atwood’s poetry with Pachter’s interpretive artwork. The culmination of their collaboration, the work that is considered their masterpiece, is The Journals of Susanna Moodie . In her reading of Susanna Moodie’s chronicles of pioneer life in nineteenth-century Canada, Atwood found the haunting and timeless themes that still obsess us.

The poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie were first published in 1970 in a standard format. This sequence of poems is regarded as a classic, in addition to being connected with her later novel, Alias Grace . In 1980, Pachter was able to add his own vibrant, evocative images and create the version they had dreamt a hand-set, hand-printed illustrated limited edition of 120 numbered copies.

This popular edition is a faithful re-creation of the original, accompanied by an introductory memoir by Pachter, describing his friendship with Atwood and the creative process behind this breathtaking work, and a foreword by David Staines, who pays homage to Atwood, Pachter, and Moodie and their central places in our art and literature.]]> 96 Margaret Atwood 1551990601 Leigh 3 3.72 1970
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: assigned-undergrad, _canadian-lit, genre-poetry, from-laycock, 1950-1974
review:

]]> 685393 320 Jane Austen 0451187903 Leigh 0 3.98 1811
author: Jane Austen
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1811
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, genre-novels, 1800-1849
review:

]]> 37969723
When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and coolly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis's people but also of the ancient world at large.

Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war—the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead—all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives—and it is nothing short of magnificent.]]> 325 Pat Barker Leigh 0 3.88 2018
author: Pat Barker
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, 2000-present, genre-novels, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 18283721 The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfrid Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his-- and our-- understanding of war.

Combing poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece.]]> 278 Pat Barker Leigh 5 4.06 1995
author: Pat Barker
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-queer, subject-war, subject-war-wwi, genre-novels, won-booker-prize, subject-psychology-mental-illness, rating-five-stars, 1975-1999, location-in-sf, they-wrote-this-for-me
review:

]]> 18283744 Pat Barker Leigh 5 4.00 1993
author: Pat Barker
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-war, subject-queer, subject-war-wwi, genre-novels, subject-psychology-mental-illness, rating-five-stars, 1975-1999, location-in-sf, they-wrote-this-for-me
review:

]]> 18283714 250 Pat Barker Leigh 5 Birdsong , which is what prompted me to come back to this book. I had previously given it five stars and listed it as a desert-island book, without having actually commented on it. There are a couple of great WWI novels out there: most of Erich Maria Remarque's work, some of Hemingway, perhaps The Enormous Room and Timothy Findley's The Wars , and so on. But when I picked up Birdsong again today and started re-immersing myself in WWI fiction, all I could think of was Regeneration, which set the standard for me. I push this book and its sequels on almost everyone I meet. I never travel without it. I can quote large sections of the text on demand. I think of it when I'm reading other books. And I cry every time I finish the trilogy. I don't know how I can endorse it more highly.]]> 3.95 1991
author: Pat Barker
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-war, subject-queer, subject-war-wwi, genre-novels, subject-psychology-mental-illness, rating-five-stars, 1975-1999, saw-film, own-film, location-in-sf, they-wrote-this-for-me
review:
At the time of writing this I'm in the midst of reading Birdsong , which is what prompted me to come back to this book. I had previously given it five stars and listed it as a desert-island book, without having actually commented on it. There are a couple of great WWI novels out there: most of Erich Maria Remarque's work, some of Hemingway, perhaps The Enormous Room and Timothy Findley's The Wars , and so on. But when I picked up Birdsong again today and started re-immersing myself in WWI fiction, all I could think of was Regeneration, which set the standard for me. I push this book and its sequels on almost everyone I meet. I never travel without it. I can quote large sections of the text on demand. I think of it when I'm reading other books. And I cry every time I finish the trilogy. I don't know how I can endorse it more highly.
]]> 465543 234 Alison Bechdel Leigh 5 4.12 2006
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2008/08/25
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-queer, genre-comics-and-graphic-novels, rating-five-stars, won-lambda-literary-award, won-stonewall-book-award, won-judy-grahn-award, 2000-present, wag-book-club, location-in-sf
review:
This was actually my very first graphic novel, and I've never read another one I liked nearly as much. This book is so brilliant.
]]> 57148 445 C.J. Cherryh 0879979526 Leigh 4 3.80 1983
author: C.J. Cherryh
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/09
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-sff, genre-novels, genre-sff-alliance-union, ownership-library-books, 1975-1999, subject-alien-anthropology, ownership-to-acquire
review:

]]> 6992242 The long-awaited sequel to the Hugo award-winning novels Cyteen and Downbelow Station.

The direct sequel to Cyteen, Regenesis continues the story of Ariane Emory, Personal Replicate, the genetic clone of one of the greatest scientists humanity has ever produced, and of her search for the murderer of her progenitor-the original Ariane Emory. Murder, politics, deception, and genetic and psychological manipulation combine against a backdrop of interstellar human factions at odds to confront questions that have remained unanswered for two decades...

Who killed the original Ariane Emory?

And can her Personal Replicate avoid the same fate?]]> 682 C.J. Cherryh 0756405920 Leigh 3 4.01 2009
author: C.J. Cherryh
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/13
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-sff, genre-novels, 2000-present, genre-sff-alliance-union, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 57045 C. J. Cherryh's Union-Alliance novels, while separate and complete in themselves, are part of a much larger tapestry—a future history spanning 5,000 years of human civilization. A blockbuster space opera of the rebellion between Earth and its far-flung colonies, it is a classic science fiction masterwork.]]> 526 C.J. Cherryh 0756400597 Leigh 4 3.91 1981
author: C.J. Cherryh
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/06
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-sff, won-hugo-award, genre-novels, genre-sff-alliance-union, 1975-1999, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 12864329
(from bookrags.com)]]> 316 William Faulkner Leigh 5 4.07 1936
author: William Faulkner
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2002/01/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-novels, rating-five-stars, assigned-undergrad, 1925-1949, wag-book-club, location-in-sf
review:
The ultimate book about storytelling. And about Quentin Compson, who breaks my heart.
]]> 10584180 The Wars. Slim and elliptical, but told with a level-headed, lyrical clarity, The Wars traces the atrocities and absurdities of war through the journey of a young Canadian officer through trenches in which barbarism and civilization exist side by side.]]> 192 Timothy Findley Leigh 4 4.06 1977
author: Timothy Findley
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: _canadian-lit, subject-war, subject-queer, subject-war-wwi, genre-novels, won-governor-generals-award, 1975-1999, location-in-sf
review:
Contains one of my favorite ending lines of all time (which I won't transcribe here, because that would ruin it).
]]> 2163262 One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the rich and lusty story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family. Love and death, war and peace, youth and age -- the noble and stunningly beautiful story of this family is alive with a truth and understanding that strike the soul.]]> 383 Gabriel García Márquez 038001503X Leigh 0 4.18 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: ownership-borrowed-from-mclaren, location-in-sf, genre-novels, 1950-1974, _colombian-lit
review:

]]> 1768959 499 James Herriot 0553268120 Leigh 4 4.37 1972
author: James Herriot
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-animals, genre-nonfiction, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves, subject-veterinary-medicine, rating-five-stars, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 2871036 384 James Herriot 0553269585 Leigh 4 4.24 1981
author: James Herriot
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-animals, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, genre-nonfiction, subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves, subject-veterinary-medicine, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 1273615 440 James Herriot 0553266055 Leigh 4 4.29 1978
author: James Herriot
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-animals, genre-nonfiction, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves, subject-veterinary-medicine, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 1649059 438 James Herriot 0553269704 Leigh 4 4.34 1976
author: James Herriot
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-nonfiction, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-animals, subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves, subject-veterinary-medicine, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 10474723
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families� lives a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism� The Stranger’s Child is a tour de a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.]]> 435 Alan Hollinghurst 0307272761 Leigh 4 3.40 2011
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2012/03/30
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-war-wwi, genre-novels, subject-queer, 2000-present, genre-academic-and-campus-fiction, location-in-sf, they-wrote-this-for-me
review:
Need a little more distance on this before I can say for sure, but I think this may be the novel I've always wanted Alan Hollinghurst (or, well, any modern gay novelist of similar talent--of whom there aren't many!) to write. Oh, this book, THIS BOOK.
]]> 24280 1463 Victor Hugo 0451525264 Leigh 4 4.19 1862
author: Victor Hugo
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1862
rating: 4
read at: 1995/01/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-novels, _french-lit, 1850-1899, saw-film, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 625228 Henry James explores his favorite themes in this novel â€� money, class,Ěýdesire,Ěýand theĚýcollision of European and American cultures.

Excerpt:
He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. "My Golden Bowl," he observed--and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything. He left the important object--for as "important" it did somehow present itself--to produce its certain effect. Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height.]]> 547 Henry James 0140024492 Leigh 3 3.63 1904
author: Henry James
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1904
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: 1900-1924, genre-novels, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 58689234 178 Joe Forno Jr. Leigh 0 4.13
author: Joe Forno Jr.
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-music, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 12977531 659 Stephen King Leigh 4 4.28 1977
author: Stephen King
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-ghost-horror-paranormal, genre-novels, subject-haunted-houses, 1975-1999, saw-film, ownership-library-books, subject-addiction-and-alcoholism
review:
The only genuine horror novel that's ever scared me. Also for my money the best thing Stephen King's ever written.
]]> 27877138
The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of It was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until the grown-up children were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.]]> 1156 Stephen King 1501142976 Leigh 4 4.18 1986
author: Stephen King
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/13
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-ghost-horror-paranormal, genre-novels, 1975-1999, location-in-sf, from-tom
review:

]]> 6162 302 Cormac McCarthy 0739412531 Leigh 4
I actually feel a little more 3.5ish about this book (is "3.5ish" an adjective? It is now), but Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ doesn't allow fractional stars. It hits a lot of my narrative kinks: this is a story about a journey, about humanity against the wilderness, about male bonding and violence; it's a kind of neo-Western; it's full of superb landscape description and dialogue; and it manages to be both sentimental/lyrical and hypermasculine/repressed. (What can I say, I love my subtext.)

But I also go to Faulkner and Hemingway to get those kinks satisfied, and while I like McCarthy for some of the same reasons I like Hemingway--I think he mostly does the same things well--I don't think he manages to follow Faulkner quite so successfully. Sometimes that unremitting Biblical cadence and all those stylized run-on sentences fall a little flat for me.

For all that, it's still a bleakly beautiful book that hits some serious high points:

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.]]> 4.01 1992
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-novels, genre-neo-westerns, won-national-book-award, won-national-book-critics-circle, 1975-1999, location-in-sf
review:
[Note, much later: this was my first McCarthy book. I think I get him more than I did when I wrote this review, and I liked The Crossing a lot.]

I actually feel a little more 3.5ish about this book (is "3.5ish" an adjective? It is now), but Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ doesn't allow fractional stars. It hits a lot of my narrative kinks: this is a story about a journey, about humanity against the wilderness, about male bonding and violence; it's a kind of neo-Western; it's full of superb landscape description and dialogue; and it manages to be both sentimental/lyrical and hypermasculine/repressed. (What can I say, I love my subtext.)

But I also go to Faulkner and Hemingway to get those kinks satisfied, and while I like McCarthy for some of the same reasons I like Hemingway--I think he mostly does the same things well--I don't think he manages to follow Faulkner quite so successfully. Sometimes that unremitting Biblical cadence and all those stylized run-on sentences fall a little flat for me.

For all that, it's still a bleakly beautiful book that hits some serious high points:

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
]]> 374808 Afterlife is a haunting and unforgettable story of men facing loss and seeking love, movingly capturing the moment in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was completely devastating the American gay community. Here, National Book Award winner Paul Monette depicts three men of various economic and social backgrounds, all with one thing in common: They are widowers, in a way, and all of their lovers died of AIDS in an LA hospital within a week of one another.

Steven, Sonny, and Dell meet weekly to discuss how to go on with their lives despite the hanging sword of being HIV positive. One tries to find a semblance of normalcy; one rebels openly against the disease, choosing to treat his body as a temple that he can consecrate and desecrate at will; and one throws himself into fierce political activism. No matter what path each one takes, they are all searching for one thing: a way to live and love again.

Afterlife finds Paul Monette at his most autobiographical, portraying men in a situation that he himself experienced, and one that he described to critical acclaim in the award-winning Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.]]> 272 Paul Monette 0758201885 Leigh 3 3.87 1990
author: Paul Monette
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2009/04/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-aids-hiv, subject-queer, ownership-library-books, genre-novels, 1975-1999, location-in-sf
review:
This is one of those books that makes me wish that Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ allowed half-stars-- I feel very 3.5-starry about it. I love all of Monette's nonfiction and I feel ambivalent about all of his fiction, but this is my favorite of his novels. When it's good, it's really good, and I get very emotionally invested.
]]> 36418912 Alternate Cover Edition for 9780679767862.

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.]]> 105 Michael Ondaatje Leigh 5 William Faulkner wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a poem. Concisely. In Canada."

So it's no surprise that it blew me away.]]> 4.10 1970
author: Michael Ondaatje
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: _canadian-lit, rating-five-stars, genre-neo-westerns, genre-poetry, assigned-undergrad, 1950-1974, location-in-sf
review:
I've taken to describing this book as "What would happen if William Faulkner wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a poem. Concisely. In Canada."

So it's no surprise that it blew me away.
]]> 54785548 Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism

In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled--and beat--The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them.

Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration--and long-overdue reassessment--of the coalition's inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.]]> 736 Sarah Schulman 0374185131 Leigh 0 4.54 2021
author: Sarah Schulman
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-aids-hiv, subject-queer, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 1091470 114 R.C. Sherriff 0435232908 Leigh 4 3.82 1928
author: R.C. Sherriff
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-drama, subject-war-wwi, subject-war, location-in-sf
review:
Objectively a three-star-ish play that gets four stars on an entirely subjective basis: I love reading plays. I love early-twentieth-century British literature. I love World-War-One trench fiction. (I loved Stanhope like the predictable sap I am.) So a play that takes place entirely in a British officers' dugout in WWI? Yes, please.
]]> 52375 Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.]]> 183 Susan Sontag 0312420137 Leigh 0 4.00 1989
author: Susan Sontag
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-nonfiction, location-in-sf, subject-bibliophilia-and-litcrit, subject-aids-hiv, subject-disease-plagues-viruses
review:

]]> 3291958 250 Michelle Tea 158005238X Leigh 3 3.42 2000
author: Michelle Tea
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/12
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: subject-queer, subject-san-francisco, genre-novels, location-in-sf, bought-at-dog-eared-books-sf, won-lambda-literary-award
review:

]]> 965884 273 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 0684873893 Leigh 4 3.90 1999
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-novels, subject-queer, _irish-lit, subject-aids-hiv, 1975-1999, location-in-sf
review:
One of the best evocations of pre-tragedy, I guess is the word, that I've ever read. That limbo of waiting for grief to begin. Slow, a little surreal, and beautiful.
]]> 48921285 The life of the legendary drummer and singer is explored through extensive research and personal interviews with family, friends, and fellow musicians.

In the Arkansas Delta, a young Levon Helm witnessed “blues, country, and gospel hit in a head-on collision,� as he put it. The result was rock 'n' roll. As a teenager, he joined the raucous Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, then helped merge a hard-driving electric sound with Bob Dylan's folk roots, and revolutionized American rock with the Band. Helm not only provided perfect “in the pocket� rhythm and unforgettable vocals, he was the soul of The Band.

Levon traces a rebellious life on the road, from being booed with Bob Dylan to the creative cauldron of Big Pink, the Woodstock Festival, world tours, The Last Waltz, and beyond with the man Dylan called “one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation.�

Author Sandra B.ĚýTooze digs deep into what Helm saw as a devastating betrayal by his closest friend, Band guitarist Robbie Robertson—and Levon’s career collapse, his near bankruptcy, and the loss of his voice due to throat cancer in 1997. Yet Helm found success in an acting career that included roles in Coal Miner’s Daughter and The Right Stuff. Regaining his singing voice, he made his last decade a triumph, opening his barn to the Midnight Rambles and earning three Grammys.]]> 400 Sandra B. Tooze 1635767040 Leigh 0 3.91
author: Sandra B. Tooze
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: to-read, genre-nonfiction, subject-music, genre-biographical, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 5598045
But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.]]> 501 Sarah Waters 1844086011 Leigh 5 and my favorite Sarah Waters novel. Why this is high praise: I love haunted-house stories, and I love Sarah Waters. And Little Stranger doesn't even feature any lesbians!

I need to come back to this someday and write a full review, but I haven't figured out how to do it justice. In the meantime, one of my favorite things about this novel is that it takes Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher) as inspiration the way that Tipping the Velvet takes Dickens and Affinity takes James's The Turn of the Screw. Waters is so, so smart and so, so good.]]> 3.69 2009
author: Sarah Waters
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/01
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: genre-novels, subject-haunted-houses, rating-five-stars, from-iona, genre-ghost-horror-paranormal, 2000-present, location-in-sf, they-wrote-this-for-me, misc-autographed-by-author
review:
Both my favorite haunted-house story--such as it is--and my favorite Sarah Waters novel. Why this is high praise: I love haunted-house stories, and I love Sarah Waters. And Little Stranger doesn't even feature any lesbians!

I need to come back to this someday and write a full review, but I haven't figured out how to do it justice. In the meantime, one of my favorite things about this novel is that it takes Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher) as inspiration the way that Tipping the Velvet takes Dickens and Affinity takes James's The Turn of the Screw. Waters is so, so smart and so, so good.
]]> 53465936 352 Kate Summerscale 1408895455 Leigh 0 to-read 3.18 2020
author: Kate Summerscale
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25901570 The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

A People Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year!

"Intelligent and captivating. Don't miss it." - People Magazine

"One of the best celebrity memoirs of the year." -The Hollywood Reporter


Rock Star. Composer and Lyricist. Feminist Icon. Survivor.

Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, for her song "Let the River Run" from the movie Working Girl.

The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. Simon brilliantly captures moments of creative inspiration, the sparks of songs, and the stories behind writing "Anticipation" and "We Have No Secrets" among many others. Romantic entanglements with some of the most famous men of the day fueled her confessional lyrics, as well as the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.]]> 384 Carly Simon 1250095891 Leigh 0 3.61 2015
author: Carly Simon
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/29
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, subject-music
review:

]]> 14276 135 William Maxwell 1860464181 Leigh 0 3.91 1980
author: William Maxwell
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves: to-read, 1975-1999, genre-novels
review:

]]> 125192 Alternative cover edition of isbn 9781860469282

They Came Like Swallows was William Maxwell's second novel. It tells of an ordinary American family overtaken by the devastating epidemic of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The book begins on the day before the armistice in a small midwestern town, and the events are seen from the perspective, in turn, of eight-year-old Peter Morison--called Bunny; of his older brother, Robert; and of their father. They are witnesses to a domestic tragedy that is written with beauty and a quite magnificent tenderness. William Maxwell has been described by The Washington Post as "one of America's most distinguished and distinctive stylists." John Updike has said that "Maxwell's voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest." The Times Literary Supplement declares that "Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America's twentieth century, and they do not fade." The Saturday Review said,"They Came Like Swallows is one of those rare tales in which child-hood is reflected in the simplicity and intensity of its own experience."]]> 192 William Maxwell Leigh 0 4.04 1937
author: William Maxwell
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves: to-read, 1925-1949, genre-novels, subject-disease-plagues-viruses
review:

]]> 60021203
His deeply personal memoir vividly describes and brings you inside the music, the politics, and the lifestyle of a generation, an epoch of cultural change that swept America and beyond. The age of rock and roll in an era of consequence, what will be considered one of the great watersheds in modern history. Wenner writes with the clarity of a journalist and an essayist. He takes us into the life and work of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. He was instrumental in the careers of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Leibovitz. His journey took him to the Oval Office with his legendary interviews with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, leaders to whom Rolling Stone gave its historic, full-throated backing. From Jerry Garcia to the Dalai Lama, Aretha Franklin to Greta Thunberg, the people Wenner chose to be seen and heard in the pages of Rolling Stone tried to change American culture, values, and morality.

Like a Rolling Stone is a beautifully written portrait of one man’s life, and the life of his generation.

Ěý]]> 592 Jann S. Wenner 0316415197 Leigh 0 3.66
author: Jann S. Wenner
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: to-read, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, genre-nonfiction
review:

]]> 62828390
After performing with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks (1957�1964), The Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon Helm) eventually rose to fame in the sixties as backing musicians for Bob Dylan. This collaboration with Dylan presented the group with a chance to expand musically and strike out on their own. The Band’s fusion of rock, country, soul, and blues music—all tinged with a southern flavor and musical adventurousness—created a unique soundscape. The combined use of multiple instruments, complex song structures, and poetic lyrics required attentive listening and a sophisticated interpretive framework. It is no surprise, then, that they soon grew to be one of the biggest bands of their era.

In Rags and An Exploration of The Band , scholars and musicians take a broad, multidisciplinary approach to The Band and their music, allowing for examination through sociological, historical, political, religious, technological, cultural, and philosophical means. Each contributor approaches The Band from their field of interest, offering a wide range of investigations into The Band’s music and influence.

Commercially successful and critically lauded, The Band created a paradoxically mythic and hauntingly realistic lyrical landscape for their songs—and their musicianship enlarged this detailed landscape. This collection offers a rounded examination, allowing the multifaceted music and work of The Band to be appreciated by audiences old and new.]]> 186 Jeff Sellars 1496842987 Leigh 0 4.40
author: Jeff Sellars
name: Leigh
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: to-read, genre-essays, genre-nonfiction, subject-music
review:

]]> 169837 176 George Pitcher 0452275539 Leigh 4 3.85 1995
author: George Pitcher
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves: subject-animals-dogs-and-wolves, subject-animals, genre-autobiography-and-memoir, genre-nonfiction, location-in-sf
review:

]]> 301899 Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy....This well-written first novel captures not just some of the dreams of that bygone era, but the way those dreams died."
-Greg Kamiya, The New York Times Book Review

Music From Big Pink is faction: real people like Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman rub shoulders with fictional characters and actual, documented events thread their way through text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of 23-year-old Greg Keltner, drug-dealer and wannabe musician, we witness the gestation and birth of a record that will go on to cast its spell across five decades - bewitching and inspiring artists as disparate as The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Travis, Wilco and Mercury Rev.]]> 160 John Niven 082641771X Leigh 0 3.71 2005
author: John Niven
name: Leigh
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves: to-read, genre-novels, 2000-present, subject-music, location-in-sf
review:

]]>