Ellen's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:42:08 -0700 60 Ellen's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Annika Rose 181513313
Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

Advance Praise:

“Part coming-of-age story, part ode to the landscape of northern Minnesota, this is also a horror story that reflects the larger horror of adolescence, of a girl’s fight for integrity in the face of demolished innocence. How could we forget Annika after we meet her? Her character is seared upon my brain. She is reminiscent of other stubborn, opinionated characters who struggle in the limbo between childhood and adulthood: Huckleberry Finn, Laura Ingalls, and Scout Finch.”—Amanda Coplin, author of The Orchardist

“Cheri Johnson’s novel Annika Rose is a marvel of invention whose always knowing prose, alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, simultaneously glimmers and cuts. A magician with character, Johnson’s most artful alchemy comes in her protagonist Annika, who, if there is a meritocracy, will become as memorable a first name in literature as Holden or Huckleberry as teenagers choked and befuddled by angst, adventure, and an ever-encroaching and frightening very real world. Annika—an eighteen-year-old post-modern Laura Ingalls inhabiting a little trailer on the prairie—is a breathing contradiction, both an old soul and a doe-innocent naif. Yet her battle—to speak when uncomfortable truths finally outweigh convenient myths—is as ageless as both life and death.”—Neal Karlen, author of This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Odyssey On + Off the Record

"Annika Rose is a coming-of-age story unlike any you’ve ever read. This novel peels back the skin of the genre’s tropes to reveal all of the sticky weirdness that exists beneath. Annika Rose’s narrative is a journey into deep psychic wildness where love, desire, envy, power, and violence collapse into one another. We open with what presents initially as a love triangle, but quickly reveals itself to be the face of a much more complex and multidimensional geometry of desire. The setting, at the edge of farm country in the age of supermarkets, is more than a backdrop. The creatures and hazards of the deep woods the characters still roam serve as an insistent reminder of the feral impulses powering our rational minds. Annika Rose is also a page-turner and compulsively readable, its sentences at turns as restrained and untamed as the country it describes." —Melanie Conroy-Goldman, author of The Likely World]]> 264 Cheri Johnson 1636281206 Ellen 0 to-read 3.62 Annika Rose
author: Cheri Johnson
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.62
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> One 208815825
One law. One child. Seven million crimes...

Climate emergency has spawned a one-child policy in the UK, ruthlessly enforced by a totalitarian regime. Compulsory abortion of 'excess' pregnancies and mandatory contraceptive implants are now the norm. Kai is a 25-year-old 'baby reaper', working for the Ministry of Population and Family Planning. If any of her assigned families attempt to exceed their child quota, she ensures they pay the price. Until she discovers that an illegal sibling on her Ministry hit-list is hers. And to protect her parents from severe penalties, she must secretly investigate before anyone else finds out.

Kai's hunt for her sister unearths much more than a dark family secret. As she stumbles across a series of heinous crimes perpetrated by the people she trusted most, she makes a catastrophic discovery that could bring down the government...and tear her family apart.]]> 11 Eve Smith Ellen 0 currently-reading 0.0 2023 One
author: Eve Smith
name: Ellen
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> Cold Eternity 226431727 "You'll want to read this one with the lights on."—Katee Robert, New York Times bestselling author

Cold Eternity is the newest action-packed space horror from S.A. Barnes perfect for fans of Severance , where desperation for eternal life leads to a fate worse than death...

Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay a gigantic space barge storing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth’s most fortunate citizens from more than a century ago�

The cryo program, created by trillionaire tech genius Zale Winfeld, is long defunct, and the AI hologram "hosts," ghoulishly created in the likeness of Winfeld’s three adult children, are glitchy. The ship feels like a crypt, and the isolation gets to Halley almost immediately. She starts to see figures crawling in the hallways, and there’s a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents.

It’s not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from�.

Also by S.A.

Dead Silence

Ghost Station

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Nightfire.]]> S.A. Barnes Ellen 3 3.75 2025 Cold Eternity
author: S.A. Barnes
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> The Choice 229437100
Imagine a world where....

Everything you ate was monitored by the government.

Every step you took was counted.

Your children were weighed every day at school.

Neighbours reported on neighbours and no one was safe from judgement.

Sugar was illegal, and baking was a crime.

Imagine if that world was here.... What would you do?

Toe the line or fight for your freedom....]]> Claire Wade Ellen 2 2.00 2019 The Choice
author: Claire Wade
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> The Waiting Rooms 58816681 Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother's past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything.
Because Kate is not the only secret that her birth mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern world to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.]]> Eve Smith Ellen 2 3.00 2020 The Waiting Rooms
author: Eve Smith
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> The Gate to Women’s Country 38825477 0 Sheri S. Tepper 1541465083 Ellen 2 3.67 1987 The Gate to Women’s Country
author: Sheri S. Tepper
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Beauty of the End: A Novel]]> 228824014 In this provocative work of speculative fiction, two sisters navigate the complex moral terrain of reproductive ethics, individual freedoms, and society’s duty to a future facing imminent extinction.

Charlie Tannehill and her twin sister, Maggie, are just eight years old when an unfortunate scientific discovery upends their world—and the world order. The revelation? Extinction, encoded in every creature’s DNA. The expiration date for humans? Only four generations away.

A decade later, unsure of what tomorrow holds, Charlie and Maggie enroll as counselors in a government-run human-husbandry program. By offering cash rewards for reproduction, they hope to forestall humanity’s decline and discover a genetic mutation that might defeat it. While Charlie struggles with the ethical implications of the work, Maggie makes unspeakable sacrifices to improve her odds of success—but such unchecked ambition could come at a greater cost than even she realizes.

Torn between her own morality, her love for her sister, and the pressures of a vanishing civilization, Charlie must search deep within to decide what she’s willing to sacrifice—for herself, for Maggie, and for society—to salvage hope for the whole of humankind.]]> Lauren Stienstra Ellen 2 2.50 The Beauty of the End: A Novel
author: Lauren Stienstra
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.50
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[History's Greatest Mysteries: Easter Island]]> 229928706
Today, Easter Island is almost synonymous for the unique artifacts that grace its coastline and interior, particularly the nearly 900 monumental statues that are unlike anything found elsewhere across the globe. Known as "Moai" by the island inhabitants, these statues have amazed everyone who has seen them in person or in photos, and they have befuddled researchers attempting to answer important questions about them. The Moai also vary considerably, with the tallest having a height of over 70 feet and the shortest being less than 4 feet. With the average statue having a height of about 13 feet and a weight of several tons, it's unclear how or why the inhabitants constructed them, and given the manner in which they were positioned across certain parts of Easter Island, it's also unclear how the inhabitants transported the giant monoliths. On top of that, some researchers have speculated that only a third of the Moai made it to their intended destination on the island.

Of course, before these statues could be created, the people who made them needed to find their way to Easter Island's desolate location, which was quite literally in the middle of the nowhere. Then they also needed to learn how to settle there and survive. The story of Easter Island's statues is extraordinary, but the story of how people came to be there in the first place is just as incredible.]]> Charles River Editors Ellen 3 3.00 2013 History's Greatest Mysteries: Easter Island
author: Charles River Editors
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean]]> 55205374 This is an alternate Cover Edition for ISBN10: 9781631529.

"The Coconut Latitudes" is an award-winning memoir about a childhood in paradise, a journey into unexpected misery, and a twisted path to redemption and truth. Leaving a successful career in the U.S., a father makes the fateful decision to settle his wife and two young daughters on an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings and declares they are the luckiest people alive.

In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes and in the grip of a brutal dictator. Against a backdrop of shimmering palms and kaleidoscope sunsets, a crisis causes the already fragile family to implode. "The Coconut Latitudes" is a haunting, lyrical memoir of surviving a reality far from the envisioned Eden, the terrible cost of keeping secrets, and the transformative power of truth and love.]]> Rita M. Gardner Ellen 0 dnf 5.00 2014 The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean
author: Rita M. Gardner
name: Ellen
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach]]> 228771130 A captivating exploration of beach resort culture—from its roots in fashionable society to its undervalued role in today’s world economy—as the industry approaches a climate reckoning.

With its promise of escape from the strains of everyday life, the beach has a hold on the popular imagination as the ultimate paradise. In The Last Resort, Sarah Stodola dives into the psyche of the beachgoer and gets to the heart of what drives humans to seek out the sand. At the same time, she grapples with the darker realities of resort strangleholds on local economies, reckless construction, erosion of beaches, weighty carbon footprints, and the inevitable overdevelopment and decline that comes with a soaring demand for popular shorelines.

The Last Resort weaves Stodola’s firsthand travel notes with her exacting journalism in an enthralling report on the past, present, and future of coastal travel. She takes us from Monte Carlo, where the pursuit of pleasure first became part of the beach resort experience, to a village in Fiji that was changed irrevocably by the opening of a single resort; from the overdevelopment that stripped Acapulco of its reputation for exclusivity to Miami Beach, where extreme measures are underway to prevent the barrier island from vanishing into the ocean.

In the twenty-first century, beach travel has become central to our globalized world—its culture, economy, and interconnectedness. But with sea levels likely to rise at least 1.5 to 3 feet by the end of this century, beaches will become increasingly difficult to preserve, and many will disappear altogether. What will our last resort be when water begins to fill the lobbies?

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.]]> Sarah Stodola Ellen 3 3.00 2022 The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach
author: Sarah Stodola
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance]]> 214152270 In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.

When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles,� he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.�

Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz.

Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family’s past.]]> 240 Joe Dunthorne 1982180757 Ellen 0 dnf 4.13 2025 Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance
author: Joe Dunthorne
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[I’ll Be OK, It’s Just a Hole in My Head]]> 229327879 I'll Be OK, It's Just a Hole in My Head. A former high school teacher and brain injury survivor, Hayes wrote her first humorous memoir while recovering from a traumatic head injury at the age of 22. Her honest take on trauma and love followed her to the stage as a stand-up comedian, where she has performed on stages such as Denver Comedy Works, Broadway Comedy Club, Stand Up NY, Dangerfield's, and The Upright Citizen's Brigade. She was highlighted by Mogul as a ""New York City Comedian To Look Out For in 2018.""

"]]> Mimi Hayes Ellen 0 to-read 0.0 2018 I’ll Be OK, It’s Just a Hole in My Head
author: Mimi Hayes
name: Ellen
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[One Perfect Day: A Mother and Son's Story of Adoption and Reunion]]> 57813602
Steve Orlandi, happily married, father of two and step-father of three, was living the typical middle class American life. But since the age of eight, when he discovered he was adopted, he had led that life dealing with inner questions about his self-identity and genetic history. Always on his mind was one simple, yet complicated and loaded question: Who am I?

In One Perfect Day, Diane shares with readers how she came to the heartbreaking conclusion to give her baby up for adoption and how this decision has affected her life sense. Through Steve's invaluable perspective, readers will also experience the lengths he traveled to discover his mother's identity and reach out to her, not knowing whether she'd want to meet with him after nearly four decades of separation. It all comes together on one perfect day.

This book asks and answers the questions: What defines family? What does it mean to forgive? And is it worth the time, energy, and emotional cost to love a stranger?
]]> Diane Burke Ellen 1 dnf 3.50 2014 One Perfect Day: A Mother and Son's Story of Adoption and Reunion
author: Diane Burke
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2014
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> Boat Baby: A Memoir 219292817 In a memoir where heroism meets humor, NBC News anchor and correspondent Vicky Nguyen tells the story of her family’s daring escape from communist Vietnam and her unlikely journey from refugee to reporter with laughter and fierce love.

Starting in 1975, Vietnam’s “boat people”—desperate families seeking freedom—fled the Communist government and violence in their country any way they could, usually by boat across the South China Sea. Vicky Nguyen and her family were among them. Attacked at sea by pirates before reaching a refugee camp in Malaysia, Vicky’s family survived on rations and waited months until they were sponsored to America.

But deciding to leave and start a new life in a new country is half the story…figuring out how to be American is the other. Boat Baby is Vicky’s memoir of growing up in America with unconventional Vietnamese parents who didn’t always know how to bridge the cultural gaps. It’s a childhood filled with misadventures and misunderstandings, from almost stabbing the neighborhood racist with a butter knife to getting caught stealing Cosmo to read the answers to Do You Really Think You Know Everything About Sex?

Vicky’s parents approached life with the attitude, �Why not us?� In the face of prejudice, they taught her to be gritty and resilient, skills Vicky used as she combatted stereotyping throughout her career, fending off the question “Aren’t you Connie Chung?� to become a leading Asian American journalist on television. She delivers a uniquely transparent account of her life, revealing how she negotiated her salary in a competitive industry, the challenges of starting a family, and the struggle to be a dutiful daughter.

Funny, nostalgic, and poignant, Boat Baby is a testament to the messy glue that bonds a family. In the tradition of We Are Dreamers by Simu Liu and Dear Girls by Ali Wong, Vicky Nguyen offers an optimistic story full of heart that illuminates the promise of what America can be.]]> 1 Vicky Nguyen 1797191888 Ellen 4 4.00 2025 Boat Baby: A Memoir
author: Vicky Nguyen
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> Private Equity 215123289
Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.

Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.

8 hrs. 44 min.]]> 9 Carrie Sun Ellen 2 3.06 2024 Private Equity
author: Carrie Sun
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> When We Were Real 214565598 From multiple award-winning author Daryl Gregory comes a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and the very nature of reality in a simulation.

JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.

Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.

When We Were Real is a tour-de-force and exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world.]]> 464 Daryl Gregory 1668060043 Ellen 0 to-read 4.24 2025 When We Were Real
author: Daryl Gregory
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> <![CDATA[America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today]]> 45134016 A groundbreaking history of how Jewish women have maintained their identity and influenced social activism as they wrote themselves into American history.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people—from the colonial era’s Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter Emma Lazarus to Bessie Hillman and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.

The twin threads binding these women together, she argues, are a strong sense of self and a resolute commitment to making the world a better place. Nadell recounts how Jewish women have been at the forefront of causes for centuries, fighting for suffrage, trade unions, civil rights, and feminism, and hoisting banners for Jewish rights around the world. Informed by shared values of America’s founding and Jewish identity, these women’s lives have left deep footprints in the history of the nation they call home.]]> Pamela S. Nadell Ellen 0 currently-reading 0.0 2019 America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today
author: Pamela S. Nadell
name: Ellen
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home]]> 210346720 The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. While the representation of Indigenous people was mostly limited to racist depictions in toys and television shows, and despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indians alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.


When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?� he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?� Embarking on a deeply personal and revealing journey into his family’s past, he discovers a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—and the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with Indigenous authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray follows a trail deep into the heart of his community—and himself. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment withtheLittle Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition.

Both personal and historical,Becoming Little Shellis a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey—and the journey of his tribe—is both revelatory and redemptive.]]> 306 Chris LaTray 1571317449 Ellen 4 4.41 2024 Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home
author: Chris LaTray
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> Something in the Walls 211004350
Then she meets journalist Sam Hunter at the grief group one day, and he has a proposition for her: Thirteen-year-old Alice Webber claims a witch is haunting her. Living with her family in the remote village of Banathel, Alice finds her symptoms are getting increasingly disturbing. Taking this job will give Mina some experience and much-needed money; Sam will get the scoop of a lifetime; and Alice will get better—Mina is sure of it.

But instead of improving, Alice’s behavior becomes inexplicable and intense. The town of Banathel has a deep history of superstition and witchcraft. They believe there is evil in the world. They believe there are ways of…dealing with it. And they don’t expect outsiders to understand.]]> 304 Daisy Pearce 1250334381 Ellen 0 to-read 3.41 2025 Something in the Walls
author: Daisy Pearce
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blob: A Love Story 223733045 'A modern-day Mrs. Caliban, BLOB is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend...

The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Now at twenty-three, after getting dumped and dropping out of college, Vi works as a front desk attendant at a hotel where she refills cucumber water samovars and fends off overtures of friendship from her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. But when Vi decides to accompany Rachel to a local drag show, her life changes forever. In the alley outside the bar, next to a trash can, is a blob with beady black eyes. Unable to leave it behind, Vi picks up the creature and, in a moment of drunken desperation, takes it home with her.

As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi realizes it obeys her commands and she decides to mold the blob into her ideal partner. She feeds it sugary cereal and a stream of pop culture, and soon the creature transforms into a movie-star handsome white man. But as Vi's desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex-boyfriend who has unfriended her, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships. Ultimately, Vi embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns that it's impossible to control those you love.

Blending the familiar with the fantastical, BLOB tells a witty, heartfelt story of what it means to be human.

'An inventive, utterly unique debut'
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light]]> 8 Maggie Su Ellen 0 currently-reading 3.46 2025 Blob: A Love Story
author: Maggie Su
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Make Room! Make Room! 25559077
A gangster is murdered during a blistering Manhattan heat wave. City cop Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the crime and captivated by the victim's beautiful girlfriend. But it is difficult to catch a killer, let alone get the girl, in crazy streets crammed full of people. The planet's population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, loot and trample for lentil 'steaks' and are controlled by sinister barbed wire dropped from the sky.]]> 9 Harry Harrison Ellen 2 3.28 1966 Make Room! Make Room!
author: Harry Harrison
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1966
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
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]]> Island 31321528 0 Aldous Huxley 1515961699 Ellen 0 dnf 3.48 1962 Island
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> Water Moon 212476837 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 15 Samantha Sotto Yambao Ellen 0 dnf 3.73 2025 Water Moon
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> The Husbands 202898067 Listening Length: 10 hours, 30 minutes

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually living?]]> Holly Gramazio 0593865502 Ellen 0 to-read 3.59 2024 The Husbands
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Close Your Eyes and Count to 10]]> 223779306
An extreme game of hide-and-seek turns deadly in this riveting new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger

When the real game begins, who will make it to the count of 10?

Charismatic daredevil and extreme adventurer Maverick Dillan invites you to the ultimate game of hide-and-seek. But as the players gather on Falcao Island, the event quickly spirals into a chilling test of survival. A storm rages as a deadly threat stalks the contestants, turning the challenge into something far more sinister than the social media stunt it was intended to be.

Enter Adele, a single mother with a fierce determination to protect her children at all costs. When she begins the game, she unwittingly enters a twisted web of deception and intrigue. Can she maneuver through the treacherous storm and the relentless competition and get home to her family? In a ruthless battle for survival where the stakes are higher than ever, the blurry line between the virtual and the real proves that the only person we can trust is ourselves.]]> Lisa Unger Ellen 0 dnf 3.10 2025 Close Your Eyes and Count to 10
author: Lisa Unger
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: dnf
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]]> Variable Star 13415584 Robert A. Heinlein Ellen 1 dnf 3.88 2006 Variable Star
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2006
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age]]> 228408127 An investigation of the New Age movement in America that aims to understand its appeal to women and the self-proclaimed prophetesses, like Love Has Won's Amy Carlson, who've created kingdoms for themselves within it.

Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American New Age culture. Today, tarot cards, astrology and crystals are everywhere—from Instagram and TikTok, to upscale boutiques and pricey wellness retreats. Sottile investigates how the recent surge of interest in New Age ideas speaks to a culture that is woven into the very fabric of America, and how self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha have built devout followings because of it. For more than a century, this pastel-colored world of love, light and enlightenment has been built upon a foundation of conspiracies, antisemitism, nationalism and a rejection of science.

In BLAZING EYE SEES ALL, Sottile seeks to understand the quest for New Age spirituality in an era of fear that has made us open to anything that claims to bring relief—from war, the climate crisis, COVID 19, or the myriad of other issues we face. At the same time, she attempts to draw a line between truly helpful, healing ideas and snake oil. The new New Age is everywhere, and Sottile helps us sort through the crystals to find true clarity.]]> 11 Leah Sottile Ellen 3 4.00 Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
author: Leah Sottile
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
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]]> The Paris Express: A Novel 228438422 From Emma Donoghue, author of Room , The Wonder and Pull of the Stars comes a taut and suspenseful historical novel that reimagines an 1895 French railway disaster, an event famously documented in dramatic photographs

Set over a single day, as the morning train travels from the Normandy coast to Paris, men, women and children take their seats in the passenger cars, which are divided by wealth and status. Among the passengers is an anarchist intent on destruction, a young boy travelling alone, a pregnant woman fleeing her home village for the anonymity of the big city, a medical student who suspects a girl may have a fatal disease, and the railway men, devoted to the train, to the company and to each other.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a thrilling ride and a literary masterpiece that captures the politics, fears and chaos of the end of the nineteenth century.]]> Emma Donoghue Ellen 1 dnf 3.00 2025 The Paris Express: A Novel
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> Hitchhikers 229091477 From New York Times and Audible best-selling author Ben H. Winters comes a twisty tale of time travel and two women who must save each other–no matter the cost.

Annie has always had high hopes for her future. But the reality of her life just isn’t measuring up. She loves her fiancé, Greg–doesn’t she? She’s going to get her degree and open her own business–won’t she?

Then, a strange old woman shows up outside her house, and she seems to know a lot about Annie. An awful lot.

Annie could tell the old woman to get lost. Yet there’s something about her Annie just can’t shake. And what she learns could change her life forever–but is it the life she envisioned?]]> 3 Ben H. Winters Ellen 2 3.51 Hitchhikers
author: Ben H. Winters
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[How Horror Works in Books and Film]]> 62985539
Shannon Scott invites you into the spooky, creepy, and sometimes surprising world of the horror genre to examine how popular scary movies and books manipulate our collective and individual fears—not only to frighten us, but also to address taboo subjects, and to reflect and comment on the state of our society. More important, she examines what lessons we can learn from these fears.

Throughout this series, she will introduce you to the many facets of fear—the traditional monsters you are familiar with, as well as examples of apocalyptic and social horror, psychological horror, and ecohorror. Using well-known characters and settings, Shannon will show you how each case can—and does—reveal a lot about our personal fears and our cultural anxieties.

The things that go bump in the night are not always in your head, but it’s your head that makes you afraid of them.

Runtime: 3 hours, 40 minutes.

©2022 Audible Originals LLC (P)2022 Audible Originals LLC]]> 4 Shannon Scott Ellen 3 3.73 2022 How Horror Works in Books and Film
author: Shannon Scott
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> The Accidental Time Machine 54163757 Rocky Mountain News). Now he delivers a provocative novel of a man who stumbles upon the discovery of a lifetime-or many lifetimes.

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring subtle quantum forces that relate to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, his calibrator turns into a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who has left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose taking a time machine trip himself-or so he thinks.]]> 8 Joe Haldeman Ellen 0 dnf 2.40 2007 The Accidental Time Machine
author: Joe Haldeman
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.40
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: dnf
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]]> Not a Very Good Murderer 229249062 Not a Very Good Murderer is a fascinating exploration of what it takes to uncover the truth and what it means to keep it buried. Learn more and listen on March 20, 2025.

Listening length: 4 hrs and 17 mins]]> 190 Ronan Farrow Ellen 2 3.37 Not a Very Good Murderer
author: Ronan Farrow
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.37
book published:
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS]]> 211003699 The incredible untold story of four women who helped win WWII by generating a wave of black propaganda.

Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.

As members of the OSS, their task was to create a secret brand of propaganda produced with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Working in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene forged letters and “official� military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy. And outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed. Until now.

In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak brings to vivid life the incredible true story of four unsung heroes, whose spellbinding achievements would change the course of history.]]> 240 Lisa Rogak 1250275598 Ellen 0 to-read 4.04 2025 Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS
author: Lisa Rogak
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Forever Free (The Forever War, #3)]]> 54974065 Joe Haldeman Ellen 2 3.12 1999 Forever Free (The Forever War, #3)
author: Joe Haldeman
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.12
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Forever War (The Forever War #1)]]> 16086358
William Mandella is a soldier in Earth's elite brigade. As the war against the Taurans sends him from galaxy to galaxy, he learns to use protective body shells and sophisticated weapons. He adapts to the cultures and terrains of distant outposts. But with each month in space, years are passing on Earth. Where will he call home when (and if) the Forever War ends?

Narrator George Wilson's performance conveys all the imaginative technology and human drama of The Forever War. Set against a backdrop of vivid battle scenes, this absorbing work asks provocative questions about the very nature of war.]]> 9 Joe Haldeman Ellen 3 3.64 1974 The Forever War (The Forever War #1)
author: Joe Haldeman
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> The Story of Grunge 228422104
In the six lectures of The Story of Grunge, you’ll explore the rise and evolution of the genre, tracing it from Seattle subculture to MTV and the Billboard charts, all the way to its decline and evolution into new forms. Along the way, you’ll meet the pioneers of grunge and see how they, and their music, continue to influence popular culture today.

While the emergence of Nirvana in the early 90s marked grunge’s ascendency, you’ll begin at an earlier point in the story, exploring the birth of the genre’s unique look and sound from within the wider punk scene in the Pacific Northwest. From there, you’ll see how grunge was a vehicle for politics and social consciousness in music, including feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement. And you’ll also understand why the rapid rise of grunge was not quite the authentic, organic process it might seem, but rather the result of marketing savvy and cynical commercialism.

The death of Nirvana’s lead singer and grunge icon Kurt Cobain in 1993—combined with increasing oversaturation and commercialization of the genre—certainly diminished the creative energy that spurred the rise of grunge. And yet, as you’ll see, the music, style, and anti-corporate philosophy of grunge has had a deep and lasting impact that continues to resonate well into the 21st century.]]> Michael Stewart Foley Ellen 3 3.62 The Story of Grunge
author: Michael Stewart Foley
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.62
book published:
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature]]> 6344286
Drout is a philologist and develops the history through his study of words and folklore. After listening I have a geater appreciation than ever for the depth of Tolkiens Middle Earth and for Ursula LeGuin land. I will go back and read Beowulf again. He also looks at King Arthur legends, CS Lewis, and Donaldson. Good stuff!]]> Michael D. C. Drout Ellen 2 3.97 2006 Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature
author: Michael D. C. Drout
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Classic Science Fiction, Volume 1]]> 8680720
Here is an anthology of exceptional science-fiction short stories, including :

* Helen O'Loy - by: Lester del Rey - 1938
* Your Cruel Face - by: Craig Strete - 1972
* Into Every Rain, a Little Life Must Fall - by: Craig Strete - 1975
* The Council of Drones - by: W. K. Sonnemann - 1936
* Twilight - by: John W. Campbell - 1934

Narrated by Stephen F. Clark

4 hrs and 15 mins]]> 4 David Dean Ellen 1 3.12 2008 Classic Science Fiction, Volume 1
author: David Dean
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2008
rating: 1
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> The Machine Stops 4711854 The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928.

After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories. In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

The book is particularly notable for predicting new technologies such as instant messaging and the internet.]]> 35 E.M. Forster 140990329X Ellen 2 4.07 1909 The Machine Stops
author: E.M. Forster
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1909
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[How Great Science Fiction Works]]> 29338161
These 24 captivating lectures reveal the qualities that make science fiction an enduring phenomenon that has been steadily gaining popularity. You'll grasp the context and achievements of authors like Arthur C. Clarke, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, and many more. You'll experience the wonder, horror, and incredible imagination of works like Frankenstein, the Foundation series, Stranger in a Strange Land, and dozens of more recent stories as well. You'll also see this genre's influence in movies like Star Wars and TV shows like The Twilight Zone.

Science fiction can take us places in time and space where no other form of fiction can - outer space, the far future, alternate universes, unfathomable civilizations. The best science fiction expands our imaginations and makes its mark on our reality. And while few writers would ever claim to predict the future, sometimes authors get it almost eerily right: Gernsback describing radar in 1911, Bradbury describing giant flatscreen TVs in 1951, Gibson inventing "cyberspace" in 1984, and so on.]]> 13 Gary K. Wolfe Ellen 4 4.13 2016 How Great Science Fiction Works
author: Gary K. Wolfe
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> I've Tried Being Nice 210907832 New York Times bestselling author Ann Leary offers a literary feast of humor and wisdom told from the perspective of a recovering people pleaser.

Having arrived at a certain age (her prime), Ann Leary casts a wry backward glance at a life spent trying—and often failing—to be nice. With wit and surprising candor, Leary recounts the bedlam of home bat invasions, an obsession with online personality tests, and the mortification of taking ballroom dance lessons with her actor husband. She describes hilarious red-carpet fiascos and other observations from the sidelines of fame, while also touching upon her more poignant struggles with alcoholism, her love for her family, her dogs, and so much more.

Prepare to laugh, cry, cringe and revel in the comically relatable chaos of Ann Leary’s life as revealed in this delighful collection of essays.]]> 7 Ann Leary Ellen 0 dnf 3.62 2024 I've Tried Being Nice
author: Ann Leary
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> <![CDATA[From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction Literature]]> 11859303
Esteemed professor Michael D.C. Drout traces the history of science fiction in this series of stimulating lectures. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to today’s cutting- edge authors, Drout offers a compelling analysis of the genre, including a look at hard-boiled science fiction, the golden age of science fiction, New Wave writers, and contemporary trends in the field.

14 Lectures on 7 Audiocassettes.]]> Michael D. C. Drout 1419388770 Ellen 3 3.86 2006 From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction Literature
author: Michael D. C. Drout
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> Abundance 226412721 From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next gener­ation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.]]> Ezra Klein Ellen 3 3.94 2025 Abundance
author: Ezra Klein
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> Tilt: A Novel 228379263 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing debut about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety.

Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people we love.]]> Emma Pattee Ellen 0 currently-reading 3.62 2025 Tilt: A Novel
author: Emma Pattee
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Saltcrop 222376600 From the acclaimed author of The Stardust Grail comes the epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister―and Earth’s environmental salvation.

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find―and save―her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister―or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

--

Content warnings available on the author's website (see author bio).]]> 384 Yume Kitasei 1250380960 Ellen 0 to-read 4.25 2025 Saltcrop
author: Yume Kitasei
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir]]> 213762614
On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The incident forced Sarah, then attempting to build a life as a writer in Los Angeles, to face an undeniable her mother, who had raised Sarah on her own, was in the midst of a schizophrenic break. That gut-wrenching acknowledgement compelled Sarah to rethink her fraught childhood, marked by her mother’s self-destructive behavior and quick turns to rage, and her relationship to her own ambition in adulthood, which felt as dark and all-consuming as it did necessary to her survival.

In this beautiful and observant memoir, Sarah reckons with the gravity of her mother’s illness and her desire to see her get better with her equally strong desire to escape her orbit for good. In doing so, she pieces together disparate elements of her life including a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but also can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner and her own Blackness, a close friendship colored by betrayal, and her need to parent herself in the absence of a beloved, but troubled caretaker.

Urgent, honest and self-aware, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of familial reconciliation amid the chaos of creative striving.]]> 1 Sarah LaBrie Ellen 1 2.75 2024 No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir
author: Sarah LaBrie
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.75
book published: 2024
rating: 1
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]]> Reading My Father: A Memoir 229910380 Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. From Styron’s youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.]]> Alexandra Styron Ellen 2 2.00 Reading My Father: A Memoir
author: Alexandra Styron
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.00
book published:
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Essays 2024 (The Best American Series)]]> 212430491 Wesley Morris Ellen 3 4.00 2024 The Best American Essays 2024 (The Best American Series)
author: Wesley Morris
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap]]> 42837426 Often brilliant and invariably provocative. --New York Times Book ReviewLeave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the 'male breadwinner marriage' is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering examination of two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, looking at what has and has not changed since the original publication in 1992, and exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and rising economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era.Now more relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were continues to be a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.]]> 1 Stephanie Coontz 1549123270 Ellen 0 dnf 3.87 1992 The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
author: Stephanie Coontz
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> All My Rage 58257396 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary YA novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.


Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Cloud’s Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.

Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever.

When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.

From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness—one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.]]> 11 Sabaa Tahir Ellen 2 4.43 2022 All My Rage
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> The Last Room on the Left 229429861 The caretaker at an isolated mountain hotel finds herself fighting for her life—and sanity—in this twisty, addictive thriller.

Kerry’s life is in Her husband has left her, her drinking habit has officially become a problem, and though the deadline for her big book deal—the one that was supposed to change everything—is looming, she can’t write a word. When she sees an ad for a caretaker position at a revitalized roadside motel in the Catskills, she jumps at the chance. It's the perfect getaway to finish her book and start fresh.

But as she hunkers down in a blizzard, she spots something through the a pale arm peeking out from a heap of snow. Trapped in the mountains and alone with a dead, frozen body, Kerry must keep her head and make it out before the killer comes for her too. But is the deadly game of cat-and-mouse all in her mind? The body count begs to differ . . .]]> Leah Konen Ellen 1 dnf 3.12 2025 The Last Room on the Left
author: Leah Konen
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 220715664 When you've been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

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

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

When Haymitch's name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He's torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 a young friend who's nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town.

As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he's been set up to fail. But there's something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171509 Ellen 3 4.49 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut Universe #4)]]> 228665323 Mary Robinette Kowal returns to Mars in this latest entry to the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Lady Astronaut series.

Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, DC—triggering an extinction-level global-warming event—Earth’s survivors have started an international effort to establish homes on space stations and the Moon.

The next step–Mars.

Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, lands on the Red Planet, optimistic about preparing for the first true wave of inhabitants. The mission objective is more than just building the infrastructure of a habitat–they are trying to preserve the many cultures and nuances of life on Earth without importing the hate.

But from the moment she arrives, something is off.

Disturbing signs hint at a hidden disaster during the First Mars Expedition that never made it into the official transcript. As Elma and her crew try to investigate, they face a wall of silence and obfuscation. Their attempts to build a thriving Martian community grind to a halt.

What you don’t know can harm you. And if the truth doesn’t come to light, the ripple effects could leave humanity stranded on a dying Earth ...

Lady Astronaut The Calculating Stars The Fated Sky The Relentless Moon The Martian Contingency]]> Mary Robinette Kowal Ellen 2 4.12 2025 The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut Universe #4)
author: Mary Robinette Kowal
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature]]> 36253523
Can literature change our real world society? At its foundation, utopian and dystopian fiction asks a few seemingly simple questions aimed at doing just that. Who are we as a society? Who do we want to be? Who are we afraid we might become? When these questions are framed in the speculative versions of Heaven and Hell on earth, you won't find easy answers, but you will find tremendously insightful and often entertaining perspectives.

Utopian and dystopian writing sits at the crossroads of literature and other important academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, psychology, politics, and sociology. It serves as a useful tool to discuss our present condition and future prospects - to imagine a better tomorrow and warn of dangerous possibilities. To examine the future of mankind through detailed and fascinating stories that highlight and exploit our anxieties in adventurous, thought-provoking, and engaging ways. From Thomas More's foundational text Utopia published in 1516 to the 21st-century phenomenon of The Hunger Games, dive into stories that seek to find the best - and the worst - in humanity, with the hope of better understanding ourselves and the world. Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature delivers 24 illuminating lectures, led by Pamela Bedore, Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, which plunge you into the history and development of utopian ideas and their dystopian counterparts. You'll encounter some of the most powerful and influential texts in this genre as you travel centuries into the past and thousands of years into the future, through worlds that are beautiful, laughable, terrifying, and always thought-provoking.]]> 13 Pamela Bedore Ellen 3 4.24 2017 Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature
author: Pamela Bedore
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Maze Runner (Maze Runner, #1)]]> 18278545
Just like Thomas, the Gladers don't know why or how they got to the Glade. All they know is that every morning the stone doors to the maze that surrounds them have opened. Every night they've closed tight. And every 30 days a new boy has been delivered in the lift.

Thomas was expected. But the next day, a girl is sent up - the first girl to ever arrive in the Glade. And more surprising yet is the message she delivers.

Thomas might be more important than he could ever guess. If only he could unlock the dark secrets buried within his mind.]]> 11 James Dashner Ellen 1 dnf 3.49 2009 The Maze Runner (Maze Runner, #1)
author: James Dashner
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2009
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II]]> 46015637 Our Mothers' War is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated.

Our Mothers' War gives center stage to one of WWII's most essential fighting forces: the women of America, whose extraordinary bravery, strength, and humanity shine through on every page.

]]> Emily Yellin Ellen 0 currently-reading 3.33 2004 Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II
author: Emily Yellin
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis]]> 228716347 New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nurse shortage. So begins the remarkable true story of the Black nurses who helped cure one of the world’s deadliest tuberculosis.

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house� where “no one left alive.�

Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the “Black Angels,� who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city’s poorest�1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become “guinea pigs� for experimental (often deadly) drugs. Yet despite their major role in desegregating the NYC hospital system—and regardless of their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

Cover photo of nurses courtesy of NYCHHC/SeaView Archives]]> Maria Smilios Ellen 4 4.00 2023 The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
author: Maria Smilios
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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]]> Somebody's Daughter 54860610 One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins.

For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who understands her. She thinks she understands him too. He's sensitive like her, an artist, and maybe even just as afraid of the dark. She's certain that one day they'll be reunited again, and she'll finally feel complete. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there.

Through poverty, puberty, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley returns to her image of her father for hope and encouragement. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates; when the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley finally finds out why her father is in prison. And that's where the story really begins.

Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she provides a poignant coming-of-age recollection that speaks to finding the threads between who you are and what you were born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.]]> 224 Ashley C. Ford 1250305977 Ellen 0 to-read 4.02 2021 Somebody's Daughter
author: Ashley C. Ford
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> The Tell: A Memoir 227729347
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our stories.

“A beautiful account of the journey of courage it takes to face the truth of one’s past.”—Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,� her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?� So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.]]> Amy Griffin Ellen 3 4.45 2025 The Tell: A Memoir
author: Amy Griffin
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> The Artist 228760995 PROVENCE, 1920

Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible.

Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuffe.

But everyone has their secrets. And, under the cover of darkness, Ettie has spent years cultivating hers.

Over this sweltering summer, everyone's true colours will be revealed.

Because Ettie is ready to be seen.
Even if it means setting her world on fire.]]> Lucy Steeds 1399819607 Ellen 0 to-read 3.40 2025 The Artist
author: Lucy Steeds
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust]]> 124454554
Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.]]> 256 Robin Judd 1469675447 Ellen 0 to-read 4.04 2023 Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust
author: Robin Judd
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning]]> 214490421 A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time

In Peter Beinart’s view, one story has long dominated Jewish communal that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of sacred Jewish tradition and history, and also warps our understanding of modern history. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, he argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the What does it mean to be a Jew?

Beinart imagines an alternate story that would draw on other nations� efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish history. A story in which Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety is not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One in which we inhabit a world that recognizes the infinite value of all human life, beginning in the Gaza Strip.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative and fearless argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral nuance, and a clear vision for the future.]]> 192 Peter Beinart 0593803892 Ellen 0 to-read 4.45 2025 Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
author: Peter Beinart
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital]]> 182776234 An audacious journalistic exploration of the present and future of beauty through the lens of South Korea's booming "K-beauty" industry and the culture it promotes, by Elise Hu, NPR host-at-large and the host of TED Talks Daily.

K-beauty has captured imaginations worldwide by promising a kind of mesmerizing perfection. Its skincare and makeup products—creams packaged to look like milkshakes or pandas, and snail mucus face masks, to name a few—work together to fascinate us, champion consumerism, and invite us to indulge. In the four years Elise Hu spent in Seoul as NPR’s bureau chief, the global K-beauty industry quadrupled. Today it's worth $10 billion and is only getting bigger as it rides the Hallyu wave around the globe.

But although self-care consumerism may be fun, darker questions lurk beneath the surface of this story. When technology makes it easy to quantify and optimize ourselves—from banishing blemishes, to whittling our waistlines, even to shaving down our jaws—where do we draw the line? What are the dangers for a society where a flawless face and body are promoted and possible? What are the real financial, physical, and emotional costs of beauty work in a culture that valorizes endless self-improvement and codes it as empowerment?

With rich historical context and deep reporting, including hours of interviews with South Korean women, Hu presents a complex, provocative look at the ways hustle culture has reached into the sinews of our bodies. She raises complicated questions about gender disparity; consumerism; the beauty imperative of an appearance obsessed society; and the undeniable political, economic, and social capital of good looks worldwide.And she points the way toward an alternative vision, one that's more affirming and inclusive than a beauty culture led by industry.]]> 10 Elise Hu 0593671694 Ellen 3 4.00 2023 Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital
author: Elise Hu
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live]]> 58256365

The term “home economics� may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken cakes. But obscured by common conception is the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople that were otherwise foreclosed.


In The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the field’s history from small farms to the White House, from Victorian suffragists to Palo Alto techies. Home economics followed the currents of American culture even as it shaped them; Dreilinger brings forward the racism within the movement along with the strides taken by Black women who were influential leaders and innovators. She also looks at the personal lives of home economics� women, as they chose being single, shared lives with women, or tried for egalitarian marriages. This groundbreaking and engaging history restores a maligned subject to its rightful importance.]]> Danielle Dreilinger 1696605326 Ellen 3 3.70 2021 The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
author: Danielle Dreilinger
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
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]]> American Housewife 216541860 For a beloved television star in 1950s America, image and reality clash in an insightful novel about fame, marriage, and secrets by the international bestselling author of The Light After the War.

New York City, 1950. Dreams come true for radio personality Maggie Lane when she gets her big break in the exciting new world of television. The Maggie Lane Baking Show is on the air.

All she has to do is act like the ideal housewife, create sumptuous desserts, charm the show’s sponsors, and sign a morality clause to ensure that her girl-next-door image remains untarnished. Although newlywed Maggie has never baked so much as a cookie, and knows even less about maintaining a home, keeping up appearances is a necessary ingredient for success. Easy. She has a supportive husband and a legion of fans who can’t wait to know her better and better, week after week.

That’s what she’s afraid of. Off camera, cracks are showing in her marriage, an old lover makes an unexpected return, and there are secrets from the past that could ruin everything Maggie has worked for. With every dream on the line, Maggie wonders if she can still have it all when the truth about what it really means to be an American housewife comes to light.]]> 268 Anita Abriel 1662525524 Ellen 0 to-read 3.64 2025 American Housewife
author: Anita Abriel
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> The Cloud of Unknowing 237186
Perhaps this is why, when Jason drowns, Diana will not accept the authorities� conclusion that his death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. She begins to send David faxes and e-mails about ancient murders, driven by her growing belief that the earth is Gaia, a living witness to her son’s murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own family’s safety as the seductive qualities of Diana’s manic energy become impossible to ignore.

In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.]]> 320 Thomas H. Cook 0151012601 Ellen 3 3.48 1400 The Cloud of Unknowing
author: Thomas H. Cook
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1400
rating: 3
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]]> Gliff 226365060
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> Ali Smith Ellen 0 dnf 3.20 2024 Gliff
author: Ali Smith
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: dnf
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book Censor's Library: A Novel]]> 222923974
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 1 Bothayna Al-Essa Ellen 0 currently-reading 3.50 2024 The Book Censor's Library: A Novel
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> The Final Orchard 228378864 From debut-author CJ Rivera, comes a harrowing tale of a parent risking it all for her child. The Final Orchard is perfect for those looking for a novel that captures them like television shows Silo and Black Mirror .

In a society where bionic enhancements are the epitome of wealth and power, scientific researcher Dr Rosio Arata threatens to topple the status quo with her pioneering organic enhancements. Yet when a horrific accident kills her daughter, Ro's quest for answers leads her to becoming trapped in a twisted version of her life's work.

In a bleak underground colony, sixteen year-old Ever is primed to rise through the ranks, gain selection and become a Saviour. It's her dream to journey to the Surface and fight the army of Forms overwhelming the globe, catching up with the boy she loves in the process. Yet nothing in this world is what it seems and soon the secrets buried in her bunker begin to unravel, threatening the future of everything.]]> C.J. Rivera Ellen 1 2.00 2024 The Final Orchard
author: C.J. Rivera
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2024
rating: 1
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]]> Wild Dark Shore 228638936 This program features multicast narration.

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.]]> Charlotte McConaghy Ellen 0 to-read 4.09 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> The Garden 142501887 An eerie, hypnotic, darkly beautiful novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world and how their lives unravel when their sanctum is breached, for fans of Piranesi and The Testaments.

In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother.

So when a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their isolated grounds, their once-solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted. Who is he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, what does he want?

As suspicions gather and allegiances falter, Evelyn and Lily are forced to confront the dark truths about themselves, the garden, and the world as they’ve known it.]]> 12 Nick Newman Ellen 4 3.86 2025 The Garden
author: Nick Newman
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era]]> 59443925 New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers--the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his swans.

There are certain women, Truman Capote wrote, who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich. Barbara 'Babe' Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C.Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy's sister)--they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. These women captivated and enchanted Capote--and at times, they infuriated him as well. He befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, in one fell swoop, he betrayed them in the most surprising and shocking way possible.

Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer's block. While enjoying all the fruits of his success--including cultivating close friendships with the richest and most admired women of the era--he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel...one based on the remarkable, racy lives of his very, very rich friends.

For years, Capote attempted to write what he believed would have been his magnum opus, Answered Prayers. But when he eventually published a few chapters in Esquire, the thinly fictionalized lives (and scandals) of his closest female confidantes were laid bare for all to see. The blowback incinerated his relationships and banished Capote from their high-society world forever...a world that was already crumbling, though none of them realized it yet. Laurence Leamer recreates in detail the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
]]> Laurence Leamer Ellen 1 dnf 3.58 2021 Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era
author: Laurence Leamer
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: dnf
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]]> Fiend 222683893 Historical horror maven Alma Katsu turns her talents to the modern world for the first time, in thisterrifying tale about an all-powerful family with an ancient evil under its thumb.

Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call.

The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. Their rivals suffer strokes. Inconvenient buildings catch on fire. Earthquakes swallow up manufacturing plants, destroying harmful evidence. Things always seem to work out for the Berishas. They’re blessed.

At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family—Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.]]> 256 Alma Katsu 0593714342 Ellen 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Fiend
author: Alma Katsu
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> You Killed Me First 219583446
Three women. Three smouldering secrets. Who will make it out alive?

It’s 5 November, and a woman awakens to a nightmare. Bound and gagged, she lies trapped in the heart of a towering bonfire. As the smoke thickens, panic sets in � she’s moments away from being engulfed in flames. How did it come to this?

Rewind eleven months: Margot, a faded TV star, and her long-suffering friend Anna watch as glamorous Liv and her flawless family move into their street. The three women soon fabricate the perfect pretence of friendship, but each harbours her own deadly secret � and newcomer Liv senses something is terribly wrong beneath the polished exteriors.

As cracks widen in the veneer of perfection and lies escalate out of control, tension ignites. Bonfire Night is approaching and someone is set to burn…But who will it be?]]> John Marrs Ellen 3 4.13 2025 You Killed Me First
author: John Marrs
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women]]> 224922814 A fun and fascinating social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School, which from the 1910s to the 1960s, trained women for executive secretary positions but surreptitiously was instilling the self-confidence and strategic know-how necessary for them to claim equality, power, and authority in the wider world.

It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl� on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.

Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "Expect great things!" was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert F. Kennedy. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.

For fans of The Barbizon and Come Fly the World, Expect Great Things! reveals the seismic impact the Katharine Gibbs school had on the American workplace—and on women’s opportunities today.]]> Vanda Krefft Ellen 4 4.00 Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women
author: Vanda Krefft
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> Raising Hare: A Memoir 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Ellen 0 to-read 4.42 2025 Raising Hare: A Memoir
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future]]> 216326919 From Yale professor and bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a searing confrontation with the authoritarian right’s efforts to annihilate public education, silence teachers, and use taxpayer money to undo a century of work to advance social justice action on race, gender, sexuality, and class.Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have all reached the same if you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history. He shows that hearts and minds are won in our elementary schools, high schools, and universities—and that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students. Deeply informed and urgently needed, this book is a vibrant call to action for lovers of democracy worldwide.]]> 1 Jason F. Stanley 1797183257 Ellen 3 4.21 2024 Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> Run for the Hills 218671843 An unexpectedroad trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.

Ever sinceher dad left them twenty years ago,it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly.

Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings.And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.

As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?

Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.]]> 256 Kevin Wilson 0063317516 Ellen 0 to-read 4.08 2025 Run for the Hills
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> When I First Held You 201496370 Silence tore them apart. Can the truth bring them back together?

In 1960s Glasgow, anti-nuclear activists Judith and Jimmy fall in love. But their future hopes are dashed when their protestors� squat is raided and many, including Jimmy, are sent to prison. Pregnant and with no word from Jimmy, Judith is forced to enter an unmarried mothers� home, give up their baby and learn to live with her grief.

More than half a century later, Judith’s Mending Shop restores broken treasures, just as Judith herself has been bound back together by her late, much-missed partner, Catherine. But her tranquillity is shattered when Jimmy—so different and yet somehow the same—reappears, yearning to unpick the painful past.

Realising they each know only half of the other’s story, Jimmy and Judith finally break the silence that tore apart what might have been their family. Amid heartbreak and hope, how much can now be mended?]]> Anstey Harris Ellen 0 dnf 4.00 2023 When I First Held You
author: Anstey Harris
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: dnf
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]]> The Dream Hotel 60499589
From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction� (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 11 Laila Lalami Ellen 3 3.80 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> Polite Calamities 209418940 In a hazy 1960s Rhode Island summer, three disparate lives converge and combust in this riveting story of the empowerment women find in friendship, solidarity, and rage, from the author of Halfway to You.

Winifred is blunt, opinionated, and outrageously colorful. In a community that demands domesticity, she simply doesn’t fit. When her wealthy husband suddenly dies, Winifred’s fellow society housewives no longer have a reason to play nice. Cast out entirely, Winifred throws roaring parties for the clerks and waiters that serve the town, finding the connections she’s been craving—and upsetting the gentle balance of her elite neighborhood in the process.

Flailing artist Marie wants to paint over her past before the painful memories consume her. On the brink of making a longtime dream come true, her newfound friendship with Winifred might be the key to finally moving forward—or her undoing.

High-society housewife June weathers a chronic pain that would make other women faint. With her veneer crumbling, she has no patience for the free spirit shaking up her community. Filled with a mixture of obsessive hatred and fascination for the outcast, June’s determined to destroy Winifred and return her life to the way it used to be.

When slow-simmering summer secrets and resentments finally reach the boiling point, everyone is at risk of being burned. Polite Calamities explores what “community� really means when societal survival is at stake, and what happens when women decide it’s time to stop behaving and start living.]]> Jennifer Gold Ellen 1 dnf 2.50 2024 Polite Calamities
author: Jennifer Gold
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.50
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: dnf
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]]> Come Fly with Me: A Novel 224874157 It’s 1962, the dawn of the jet-set era. Hope takes flight for two Pan Am stewardesses navigating an adventurous new life in a novel about love, friendship, and escape by the bestselling author of The Memory of Us and Until We Meet .

Welcome to a glamorous gateway to the jet age.

Judy Goodman and Beverly Caldwell have different reasons for putting continents and oceans between themselves and their disparate pasts, but they have the same desire—to earn a coveted position on an elite team of stewardesses for Pan American Airlines. For Judy, running away from an oppressive marriage in small-town Pennsylvania is a risk she must take. And for Beverly, leaving behind the gilded cage of New York society will allow her to pursue a future of her own making.

Embracing the culture, etiquette, and strict rules of a thrilling and unpredictable new world above the clouds, Judy and Beverly are bound for faraway destinations and opportunities that other women dare only to dream about. But as they build a deep friendship, encounter love and danger, and discover what’s truly important, Judy and Beverly must also confront the secrets that could change their lives all over again—and forever.]]> Camille Di Maio Ellen 3 4.40 2025 Come Fly with Me: A Novel
author: Camille Di Maio
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> The River Has Roots 211004176 Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.�

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters� bond but also their lives will be at risk…]]> 133 Amal El-Mohtar 1250341086 Ellen 0 to-read 4.21 2025 The River Has Roots
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This]]> 226761353 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values

“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.� This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> Omar El Akkad Ellen 0 dnf 4.58 2025 One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: dnf
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]]> The House of Lost Secrets 201889751 She thought she knew her best friend…She was wrong.

The weatherworn cottage Clachan has always been Jo Wilding’s sanctuary, a blissful escape from her tumultuous home life. From the first summer Rachel invited her to join the Willoughby family in the wilds of Scotland, she fell in love with the sea air, sandy beach and Tristan, Rachel’s older brother�

All these years later, Clachan is where their most important occasions and conversations take place, so when Rachel organises a weekend there, Jo never suspects that this weekend will change everything. Because it turns out Rachel has been keeping a secret, a betrayal that plunges Jo into a past she’s spent years trying to forget.

Left to untangle the pieces of their past alone, Jo has to decide if there is such a thing as forgiveness when there is no one left to forgive?]]> 0 Anstey Harris 150126978X Ellen 3 3.00 2024 The House of Lost Secrets
author: Anstey Harris
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> <![CDATA[James Baldwin: The Man and His Work]]> 228015232
Explore these questions and more in the six lectures of James Baldwin: The Man and His Work, taught by Rafael Walker of Baruch College, City University of New York. As you explore Baldwin’s life, from his childhood to his international writing career to his work as a public voice for the marginalized all over the world, you will understand how he became one of the 20th century’s most influential Black writers and intellectuals. You’ll also examine many of his most famous works, including the novels Go Tell It on The Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, his powerful essays, and his short stories “Sonny’s Blues� and “Going to Meet the Man.� As you experience these complex and deeply personal pieces of writing, you’ll see how Baldwin’s life and work were inseparable, with his brilliant works drawing from his experiences both in America and abroad.

Near the end of his life, Baldwin’s influence seemed to be waning. But as you’ll see, the startling clarity and power of his words were never truly forgotten. Today his writings serve as a model for a new generation of authors, challenging readers to reflect on the injustices around them and inspiring activists in the Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, and other social movements. With his legacy reignited for the 21st century, you now have the chance to discover why James Baldwin’s impact as both a writer and a vocal force for change is still profoundly relevant.

©2025 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2025 Audible Originals, LLC.]]> Rafael Walker Ellen 0 dnf 3.95 James Baldwin: The Man and His Work
author: Rafael Walker
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: dnf
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]]> My Favorite Terrible Thing 210630620 Listening Length: 9 hours and 39 minutes

The world’s most famous author has vanished. A thrilling hunt of mind games and twisting suspense begins when a detective sees evidence written into her novel.

Detective Nina Travers is so good at her job that she blends in like a benevolent Tom Ripley. She can be anyone. She can be no one. Nina wants to be someone . Her new case will finally get her noticed.

Bestselling author Claire Ross has disappeared from the Hamptons on her wedding day. How tragic that the author of an epic romance that captured the heart, soul, and imagination of the world should suddenly vanish on the happiest day of her life. Claire’s distraught family and friends, her mystified fiancé, and her zealous online fans all have their theories―from the sinister to the hopeful. Nina’s job is to find the truth, and she’s pursuing an angle that no one else has explored. She’s looking for a trail of clues in Claire’s novel.

Reading between its haunting lines, Nina follows a spiraling path of secret love, obsession, and death. What Nina finds is so shocking even she never saw it coming.]]> 10 Madeleine Henry Ellen 0 dnf 4.25 2024 My Favorite Terrible Thing
author: Madeleine Henry
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: dnf
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]]> Next Stop 228402574 For listeners of Leave the World Behind and Exit West , an astonishingly resonant novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life through one family after a black hole consumes the State of Israel and similar strange events occur in major cities around the world, ushering in a time of chaos as well as miracles.

When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as similar anomalies spread across the globe, a conspiracy takes will the holes swallow the Jews, or will they swallow the earth?

Against a backdrop of antisemitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city’s Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the unusual events, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Others leave for the south, forming militias and stockpiling weapons. But most, like Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael, stay and try to make their way amid the hostility and small joys of the ever-changing landscape.

But then thousands of commercial planes are sucked from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.

Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is an enthralling novel that explores the fault lines between our collective, national, and individual memories and how our deepest bonds can be unexpectedly reshaped in moments of crisis.]]> Benjamin Resnick Ellen 3 3.00 Next Stop
author: Benjamin Resnick
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> The Stranger in the Mirror 56087448
A diabolically twisty, psychologically unsettling novel about a woman with no recollection of her past from the authors of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick The Last Mrs. Parrish and The Wife Stalker.

“Liv Constantine plants her flag squarely in land staked out by the likes of Lisa Gardner and Karin Slaughter.”�Providence Journal

Addison’s about to get married, but she’s not looking forward to the big day. It’s not her fiancé; he’s a wonderful man. It’s because Addison doesn't know who she really is. A few years ago, a kind driver found her bleeding next to a New Jersey highway and rescued her. While her physical wounds healed, Addison’s memory never returned. She doesn’t know her real name. Or how she ended up injured on the side of a road. Or why she can’t shake the notion that she may have done something very, very bad . . .

In a posh home in the Boston suburbs, Julian tries to figure out what happened to his loving, caring wife, Cassandra, who disappeared without a trace two years ago. She would never have left him and their seven-year-old daughter Valentina of her own free will—or would she?

As these two lives intersect, The Stranger in the Mirror hooks readers with riveting drama, told with Liv Constantine’s hallmark blend of glamour, tense psychological thrills, and jaw-dropping twists.]]> Liv Constantine Ellen 0 dnf 3.65 2021 The Stranger in the Mirror
author: Liv Constantine
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: dnf
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]]> You're Safe Here 228402057 Wellness, motherhood, and technology converge in a near future California, as three women’s seemingly innocuous decisions have further-reaching consequences than any of them could imagine in this timely, clever, and white-knuckled thriller.

In 2060, the WellPod is the latest launch from the largest tech company the world has ever seen—a fleet of floating personal paradises scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean, focused entirely on health, solitude, and relaxation. Created by an enigmatic founder who will stop at nothing to ensure her company’s success, it is the long-awaited pinnacle of wellness technology. For newly pregnant Maggie, the six-week program is the perfect chance to get away…especially since the baby isn’t her partner’s.

Noa Behar isn’t a perfect fiancée. She’s too distracted, too focused on her work in helping program the WellPod to give Maggie the attention she deserves. But when she discovers something rotten beneath WellPod’s shiny exterior—a history of faulty tech and dangerous cover-ups—she knows one she’ll do whatever it takes to keep Maggie safe.

The problem? The malfunctioning WellPods are already at sea. And there’s a storm coming....]]> Leslie Stephens Ellen 4 4.00 2024 You're Safe Here
author: Leslie Stephens
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> There's Something About Mira 223198186
From USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev comes the heartfelt story of a woman determined to reunite a lost ring with its owner, who ends up finding herself along the way.

Mira Salvi has the perfect life—a job she loves, a fiancé everyone adores, and the secure future she’s always imagined for herself. Really, she hasn’t a thing to complain about, not even when she has to go on her engagement trip to New York alone.

While playing tourist in the city, Mira chances upon a lost ring, and her social media post to locate its owner goes viral. With everyone trying to claim the ring, only one person seems to want to find its owner as badly as Mira journalist Krish Hale. Brooding and arrogant, he will do anything to get to write this story.

As Krish and Mira reluctantly join forces and jump into the adventure of tracing the ring back to where it belongs, Mira begins to wonder if she is in the right place in her own life. She had to have found this ring for a reason…right? Maybe, like the owner of the lost ring, her happy ending hasn’t been written yet either.]]> 10 Sonali Dev Ellen 0 dnf 4.12 2025 There's Something About Mira
author: Sonali Dev
name: Ellen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: dnf
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]]> The Rules of Fortune 223846201
A daughter’s investigation into her family history threatens to destroy their legacy in a gripping novel about power, money, and secrets by the author of Token Black Girl.

On their Martha’s Vineyard estate, the Carter family prepares to celebrate. But when the billionaire patriarch dies right before his seventieth birthday, the media is quick to question the future of the multi-industry conglomerate that makes the Carters living legends. Amid the succession crisis, his daughter, Kennedy, is questioning her father’s past.

Kennedy is an aspiring filmmaker, and the documentary she’d planned to present at her father’s party begins an inquest into the life of a man she never really knew. A thoughtful outlier in an elite and fiercely guarded dynasty, she’s not interested in keeping up the appearances that define her impeccably poised mother or in the capitalist games her ruthless brother plays. Kennedy wants only to understand the origins of their empire, and the lethally ambitious man behind it. That understanding comes at a cost.

As a twisted history emerges, the fault lines in the family grow. Torn between morality and the promise of maintaining wealth, Kennedy must decide what’s most important—the Carter legacy or exposing the shocking truth of how it was built.]]> 11 Danielle Prescod Ellen 0 dnf 3.67 2025 The Rules of Fortune
author: Danielle Prescod
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: dnf
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]]> Obscura 40200349 She’s felt it before…the fear of losing control. And it’s happening again.

In the near future, an aggressive and terrifying new form of dementia is affecting victims of all ages. The cause is unknown, and the symptoms are disturbing. Dr. Gillian Ryan is on the cutting edge of research and desperately determined to find a cure. She’s already lost her husband to the disease, and now her young daughter is slowly succumbing as well. After losing her funding, she is given the unique opportunity to expand her research. She will travel with a NASA team to a space station where the crew has been stricken with symptoms of a similar inexplicable psychosis—memory loss, trances, and violent, uncontrollable impulses.

Crippled by a secret addiction and suffering from creeping paranoia, Gillian finds her journey becoming a nightmare as unexplainable and violent events plague the mission. With her grip weakening on reality, she starts to doubt her own innocence. And she’s beginning to question so much more—like the true nature of the mission, the motivations of the crew, and every deadly new secret space has to offer.

Merging thrilling science-fiction adventure with mind-bending psychological suspense, Wall Street Journal bestselling author Joe Hart explores both the vast mysteries of outer space and the even darker unknown that lies within ourselves.]]> 11 Joe Hart Ellen 0 dnf 3.29 2018 Obscura
author: Joe Hart
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: dnf
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]]> The Last One Home 57200598
A razor-sharp novel of suspense about the lies families tell—and those we choose to believe—by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Jane Doe.

Lauren Abrams wants nothing to do with her damaged mother, whose spurious testimony sent Lauren’s father to prison for murder years ago. After a serial killer’s confession to the crime restored justice, Lauren chose to live with her father and grandmother. Now an adult, Lauren has come home to the Sacramento family estate for good, her mother’s lies be damned�

It’s been decades since Donna made her cheating husband pay, but she hasn’t forgotten the past. She knows her estranged daughter has made a terrible mistake by returning to the estate. There’s more to the story of the welcoming old homestead—and her childhood—than Lauren knows.

As Lauren settles in, she is haunted by the questions of what really happened with her father, what her mother might be hiding, and what secrets the family ranch holds. It’s getting so dark, Lauren may not be able to see the truth to save her life.]]> 10 Victoria Helen Stone Ellen 1 dnf 3.13 2021 The Last One Home
author: Victoria Helen Stone
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> Future's Edge 225513845
When archaeologist Ursula Morrow accidentally infects herself with an alien parasite, she fears she may have jeopardised her career. However, her concerns become irrelevant when Earth is destroyed, billions die, and suddenly no one needs archaeologists anymore�

Two years later, she's plucked from a refugee camp on a backwater world and tasked with retrieving the artifact that infected her, as it just might hold the key to humanity's survival. With time running short, and the planet housing the weapon now situated in hostile territory, she realises she's going to have to commit an act of desperate piracy if she's going to achieve her objective before the enemy's final onslaught.

A thrilling journey into deep space where the fights are brutal, the relationships are complicated and the world ended years ago.]]> Gareth L. Powell Ellen 2 2.00 Future's Edge
author: Gareth L. Powell
name: Ellen
average rating: 2.00
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Feed 55941896
IT MAKES US. IT DESTROYS US. NOW WE MUST LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT IT.

The Feed is accessible everywhere, by everyone, at any time. It instantaneously links us to all information and global events as they break. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared through it; it is the essential tool everyone relies on to know and understand the thoughts and feelings of partners, parents, friends, children, colleagues, bosses, employees. . .in fact, of anyone and everyone else in the world.

Tom and Kate use the Feed, but Tom has resisted its addiction, which makes him suspect to his family. After all, his father created it. But that opposition to constant connection serves Tom and Kate well when the Feed collapses after a horrific tragedy shatters the world as they know it.

The Feed’s collapse, taking modern society with it, leaves people scavenging to survive. Finding food is truly a matter of life and death. Minor ailments, previously treatable, now kill. And while the collapse has demolished the trappings of the modern world, it has also eroded trust. In a world where survival of the fittest is a way of life, there is no one to rely on except yourself. . .and maybe even that is no longer true.

Tom and Kate have managed to protect themselves and their family. But then their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing. Who has taken her? How do you begin to look for someone in a world without technology? And what happens when you can no longer even be certain that the people you love are really who they claim to be?




RUNNING TIME => 11hrs. and 20mins.

©2018 Windlark Ltd (P)2018 Headline UK]]> Nick Clark Windo Ellen 0 dnf 3.33 2018 The Feed
author: Nick Clark Windo
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The McAvoy Sisters Book of Secrets]]> 50028078
What drove their family apart just might bring them back together...

It's been seventeen years since the tragic summer the McAvoy sisters fell apart. Lindy, the wild one, left home, carved out a new life in the city and never looked back. Delia, the sister who stayed, became a mother herself, raising her daughters and running the family shop in their small Pennsylvania hometown on the shores of Lake Erie.

But now, with their mother's ailing health and a rebellious teenager to rein in, Delia has no choice but to welcome Lindy home. As the two sisters try to put their family back in order, they finally have the chance to reclaim what's been lost over the years: for Delia, professional dreams and a happy marriage, and for Lindy, a sense of home and an old flame--and best of all, each other.

But when one turbulent night leads to a shocking revelation, the women must face the past they've avoided for a decade. And there's nothing like an old secret to bring the McAvoy women back together and stronger than ever.

With warm affection and wry wit, Molly Fader's The McAvoy Sisters Book of Secrets is about the ties that bind family and the power of secrets to hold us back or set us free.]]> Molly Fader Ellen 1 3.29 2019 The McAvoy Sisters Book of Secrets
author: Molly Fader
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2019
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Into the Madness: A Killer’s Game, a Woman’s Obsession, a Dark Conspiracy]]> 228464453
Into the Madness is a deep dive into the events leading up to the mass shooting and the story of a woman who became a confidant to Crimo and the final player in his game. Drawing from dozens of interviews and more than 48 hours of recorded calls with Bobby, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson tells a story that will challenge everything you think you know about mass shootings, conspiracy theories, and the fragile boundary between reality and illusion.

The series explores the rise of nihilistic violence, the role of technology in fostering extremism, and America’s collective descent into conspiracy thinking. Into the Madness will leave you questioning where the truth ends—and the madness begins.

Into the Madness is an Audible Original, produced by Trevor Aaronson and Western Sound.

This program contains graphic descriptions of violence and death, as well as recordings of a man accused of committing mass murder. Listener discretion is advised.]]> 5 Trevor Aaronson Ellen 2 3.25 Into the Madness: A Killer’s Game, a Woman’s Obsession, a Dark Conspiracy
author: Trevor Aaronson
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish]]> 214109335
Part memoir, part explosive window into the mind of a catfisher, a thrilling personal account of three women coming face-to-face with an internet predator and teaming up to expose them

In 2011 three successful and highly educated women fell head over heels for the brilliant and charming Ethan Schuman. Unbeknownst to the others, each exchanged countless messages with Ethan, staying up late into the evenings to deepen their connections with this fascinating man. His detailed excuses about broken webcams and complicated international calling plans seemed believable, as did last-minute trip cancellations. After all, why would he lie? Ethan wasn't after money—he never convinced his marks to shell out thousands of dollars for some imagined crisis. Rather, he ensnared these women in a web of intense emotional intimacy.

After the trio independently began to question inconsistencies in their new flame's stories, they managed to find one another and uncover a greater deception than they could have ever imagined. As Anna Akbari and the women untangled their catfish’s web, they found other victims and realized that without a proper crime, there was no legal reason for “Ethan� to ever stop.

There is No Ethan catalogues Akbari's experience as both victim and observer. By looking at the bigger picture—a world where technology mediates our relationships; where words and images are easily manipulated; and where truth, reality, and identity have become slippery terms—Akbari provides an explanation for why these stories matter.]]> Anna Akbari Ellen 2 3.61 2024 There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish
author: Anna Akbari
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Real Americans 212433028
READ WITH JENNA’S MAY BOOK CLUB PICK � A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK � From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett � "A page turner.”—Ha Jin � “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer � "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?]]> Rachel Khong Ellen 4 3.80 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Ellen
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
review:

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