en-US Fri, 17 Jan 2025 10:04:58 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 28348 564 Fyodor Dostoevsky isa 0 currently-reading 4.32 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: isa
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1866
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]]> 41975321 Two women separated by centuries but connected by one beautiful silk dress. A captivating novel based on a real-life shipwreck discovered off Texel Island by the bestselling author of Gulliver's Wife, Lauren Chater.

Jo Baaker, a textiles historian and Dutch ex-pat is drawn back to the island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a 17th century silk dress. Retrieved by local divers from a sunken shipwreck, the dress offers tantalising clues about the way people lived and died during Holland's famous Golden Age.
Ìý
Jo's research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress turned ladies� companion who served the enigmatic artist Catharina van Shurman. The two women were said to share a powerful bond, so why did Anna abandon Catharina at the height of her misfortune?
Ìý
Jo is convinced the truth lies hidden between the folds of this extraordinary dress. But as she delves deeper into Anna’s history, troubling details about her own past begin to emerge.
Ìý
On the small Dutch island of Texel where fortunes are lost and secrets lie buried for centuries, Jo will finally discover the truth about herself and the woman who wore the Winter Dress.

]]> 367 Lauren Chater 1760850233 isa 0 to-read 3.87 2022
author: Lauren Chater
name: isa
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> 56449476 An emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America.

“Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes…�

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.]]> 346 Lynda Rutledge 1542023351 isa 0 to-read 4.35 2021
author: Lynda Rutledge
name: isa
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 544 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 isa 5 all-time-favorites 4.31 2014
author: Anthony Doerr
name: isa
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: all-time-favorites
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]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X isa 0 to-read, all-time-favorites 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: isa
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> 20555501
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier.
Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.

SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION - THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH

It's a small story, about:
a girl
an accordionist
some fanatical Germans
a Jewish fist fighter
and quite a lot of thievery.

ANOTHER THING YOU SHOULD KNOW - DEATH WILL VISIT THE BOOK THIEF THREE TIMES

--back cover]]> 554 Markus Zusak isa 5 4.47 2005
author: Markus Zusak
name: isa
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/09
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]]> 58100627
Strong and confident, Jurgis begins a job in a meatpacking plant, where he beats the twelve-hour workdays, the repellent and dangerous labor conditions, and the pitifully low pay. But when his family is cheated in a housing swindle, his father is forced to turn over one-third of his pay to the man who hired him. A sprained angle costs Jurgis his job, the American Dream that inspired him veers into nightmare, and worse is yet to come.

Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle after working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking district for seven weeks. His aim was to draw America's intention to the plight of the exploited immigrant workers and usher in a new age of socialism. Indeed, the public was horrified, but not by workers' suffering. Rather, Sinclair's graphic depictions of the industry's filthy conditions and use of diseased animals quickly led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.]]> 407 Upton Sinclair 1435171683 isa 0 currently-reading 3.90 1906
author: Upton Sinclair
name: isa
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1906
rating: 0
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]]> 196044892
A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.

There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild.

In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved—his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound.

Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life.

Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, Dayspring is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse.]]> 432 Anthony Oliveira 077100382X isa 0 to-read 4.10 2024
author: Anthony Oliveira
name: isa
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> 51791252
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.]]> 343 Brit Bennett 0525536299 isa 0 to-read 4.11 2020
author: Brit Bennett
name: isa
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
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]]> 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller isa 0 4.30 2011
author: Madeline Miller
name: isa
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 41150487
As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?]]> 448 Casey McQuiston 1250316774 isa 0 4.06 2019
author: Casey McQuiston
name: isa
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 16143347 A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.]]> 242 E. Lockhart 0385741278 isa 0 to-read, dnf 3.66 2014
author: E. Lockhart
name: isa
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]> 419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 isa 0 4.16 2015
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: isa
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 isa 0 to-read 3.81 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: isa
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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]]> 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 isa 0 to-read 3.82 1991
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: isa
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> 13497818 A BIG NOVEL ABOUT A SMALL TOWN�

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford appears to be an English idyll—with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey—but behind its charming façade lies a town at war. The rich clash with the poor, teenagers battle their parents, wives contend with their husbands, and teachers struggle with their pupils. Pagford is far from what it seems.

The empty seat Barry leaves on the town council becomes the catalyst for the fiercest conflict the town has ever seen. The election to fill his seat is fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations. Who will triumph in this battle of wills?

Blackly comic, thought-provoking, and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.]]> 503 J.K. Rowling 0316228532 isa 0 to-read 3.28 2012
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 27362503
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up � she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating� rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan � her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.]]> 386 Colleen Hoover 1668021048 isa 0 4.11 2016
author: Colleen Hoover
name: isa
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 29056083
It was always difficult being Harry Potter, and it isn't much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and a father of three school-age children.

While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son, Albus, must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.

Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany, a new play by Jack Thorne, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the complete and official playscript of the original, award-winning West End production. This updated edition includes the final dialogue and stage directions, a conversation piece between director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne, the Potter family tree, and a timeline of events in the wizarding world leading up to "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child."]]> 343 J.K. Rowling 0540027340 isa 0 3.42 2016
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 3836
With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible."]]> 1023 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra isa 0 to-read 3.86 1615
author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
name: isa
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1615
rating: 0
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]]> 76620 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9780380395866 here.

Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.]]> 478 Richard Adams 038039586X isa 0 to-read 4.08 1972
author: Richard Adams
name: isa
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> 16181775
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful� husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

The Rosie Project is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.]]> 292 Graeme Simsion 1476729085 isa 0 to-read 4.00 2013
author: Graeme Simsion
name: isa
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 37415 238 Zora Neale Hurston 0061120065 isa 0 3.98 1937
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: isa
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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]]> 1381 Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey.

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.

This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.

--

Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.]]> 541 Homer 0143039954 isa 0 3.79 -700
author: Homer
name: isa
average rating: 3.79
book published: -700
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]]> 50623864
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.]]> 448 Victoria E. Schwab 0765387565 isa 0 to-read 4.16 2020
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: isa
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 33574273 It was a dark and stormy night.

Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.

Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic Time Quintet.]]> 218 Madeleine L'Engle 1250153271 isa 0 3.91 1962
author: Madeleine L'Engle
name: isa
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> 375802
But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.]]> 324 Orson Scott Card 0812550706 isa 0 4.31 1985
author: Orson Scott Card
name: isa
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1985
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]]> 17245 You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

This Norton Critical Edition includes a rich selection of background and source materials in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.

Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.]]> 488 Bram Stoker 0393970124 isa 0 to-read 4.02 1897
author: Bram Stoker
name: isa
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1897
rating: 0
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]]> 7604 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141182537.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.]]> 368 Vladimir Nabokov 0679723161 isa 0 to-read 3.87 1955
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: isa
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
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]]> 20893528 816 Louisa May Alcott 0147514010 isa 0 to-read 4.26 1868
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: isa
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1868
rating: 0
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]]> 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned � from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren � an enigmatic artist and single mother � who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town � and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 isa 0 to-read 4.05 2017
author: Celeste Ng
name: isa
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
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]]> 2
Harry has had enough. He is beginning to think he must do something, anything, to change his situation, when the summer holidays come to an end in a very dramatic fashion. What Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down...]]> 912 J.K. Rowling isa 0 4.50 2003
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> 1 652 J.K. Rowling isa 0 4.57 2005
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2005
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]]> 6 734 J.K. Rowling 0439139597 isa 0 4.56 2000
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> 5 435 J.K. Rowling 043965548X isa 0 4.57 1999
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> 170448 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 isa 2 want-to-reread 4.07 1945
author: George Orwell
name: isa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 2
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review:

]]> 59344312
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of what really happened the day her daughter died.

Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents would devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue to love her.]]> 336 Colleen Hoover 153872474X isa 0 4.29 2018
author: Colleen Hoover
name: isa
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves: to-read, books-i-will-never-read
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]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born � a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam � and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 isa 0 to-read 4.05 2019
author: Ocean Vuong
name: isa
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 isa 0 to-read 3.62 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: isa
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 11387515 I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.

August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. Wonder, begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others.]]> 315 R.J. Palacio 0375869026 isa 0 4.34 2012
author: R.J. Palacio
name: isa
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/22
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]]> 18692431
But then one day, a moving truck arrives. New next door neighbors. I look out the window, and I see him. He’s tall, lean and wearing all black—black t-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly. I want to learn everything about him, and I do. I learn that he is funny and fierce. I learn that his eyes are Atlantic Ocean-blue and that his vice is stealing silverware. I learn that when I talk to him, my whole world opens up, and I feel myself starting to change—starting to want things. To want out of my bubble. To want everything, everything the world has to offer.

Maybe we can’t predict the future, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.]]> 312 Nicola Yoon 0553496646 isa 0 3.96 2015
author: Nicola Yoon
name: isa
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 6442769 Who is the real Margo?

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew...]]> 305 John Green 014241493X isa 0 3.68 2008
author: John Green
name: isa
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/22
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]]> 176443045
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.

When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.

From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...

Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.]]> 400 Douglas Westerbeke 1668026066 isa 0 to-read 3.48 2024
author: Douglas Westerbeke
name: isa
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 186872566 Once a young woman uncovers a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new wife, she’ll have to fight to keep herself—and the woman she loves—safe in this stunning queer reimagining of the classic folktale The Selkie Wife.

When a sharp cry wakes Jean in the middle of the night during a terrible tempest, she’s convinced it must have been a dream. But when the cry comes again, Jean ventures outside and is shocked by what she discovers—a young woman in labor, already drenched to the boneÌýin the freezing cold and barely able to speak a word of English.

Although Jean is the only midwife in the village and for miles around, she’s at a loss as to who this woman is or where she’s from; Jean can only assume she must be the new wife of the neighbor up the road, Tobias. And when Tobias does indeed arrive at her cabin in search of his wife, Muirin, Jean’s questions continue to grow. Why has he kept his wife’s pregnancy a secret? And why does Muirin’s open demeanor change completely the moment she’s in his presence?

Though Jean learned long ago that she should stay out of other people’s business, her growing concern—and growing feelings—for Muirin mean she can’t simply set her worries aside. But when the answers she finds are more harrowing than she ever could have imagined, she fears she may have endangered herself, Muirin, and the baby. Will she be able to put things right and save the woman she loves before it’s too late, or will someone have to pay for Jean’s actions with their life?]]> 352 Rose Sutherland 0593594592 isa 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Rose Sutherland
name: isa
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/22
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]]> 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 isa 0 to-read 4.14 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: isa
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207670238
“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.�

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.]]> 976 SenLinYu isa 1 4.73 2025
author: SenLinYu
name: isa
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2025
rating: 1
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date added: 2024/04/22
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not even one star. this is plagiarism. joanne has lawyers and she’s not afraid to use them, margaret probably does as well. i do truly hope you all enjoy this rape slop that only harms under privileged women around the world.
]]> 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 isa 0 to-read 3.85
author: Carys Davies
name: isa
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 150247408 Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms.

What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others—a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm.

But don't worry: there's still sex to consider—and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces—plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong—include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires.]]> 384 Alice Wong 0593469739 isa 0 to-read 4.28 2024
author: Alice Wong
name: isa
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 193544852
Spirits are drawn to salt, be it blood or tears.

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable.

Then, someone is murdered.

Poor, alone, and with a history of 'hysterics', Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she'll have to prove who—or what—is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.

"A Sapphic seance of preternatural proportions, My Darling Dreadful Thing summons a stunning new literary voice to be reckoned with. Johanna van Veen reaches beyond the veil to conjure up a gothic shocker like no other."—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters

©2024 Johanna van Veen (P)2024 Tantor]]> 375 Johanna van Veen 1728281547 isa 0 to-read 3.85 2024
author: Johanna van Veen
name: isa
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 178019710 The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror literature

It’s been four years since Jade Daniels last set foot in Proofrock, Idaho. Since then, her reputation, and everything around Indian Lake, has changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of the savage history of Proofrock, Idaho, no one’s got the mettle to confront � no one except a final girl, making her last stand, this time for everything.

New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones has crafted an epic horror trilogy of generational trauma and stolen hope. It’s the story of the American West written in blood. And it’s the story of one girl who doesn’t know how to give up.]]> 455 Stephen Graham Jones 1668011662 isa 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: isa
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 isa 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Sierra Greer
name: isa
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 123288408 The Devil knows your name, David Aristarkhov.

As a teen, David Aristarkhov was a psychic prodigy, operating under the shadow of his oppressive occultist father. Now, years after his father’s death and rapidly approaching his thirtieth birthday, he is content with the high-powered life he’s curated as a Boston attorney, moonlighting as a powerful medium for his secret society.

But with power comes a price, and the Devil has come to collect on an ancestral deal. David’s days are numbered, and death looms at his door.

Reluctantly, he reaches out to the only person he’s ever trusted, his ex-boyfriend and secret Society rival Rhys, for help. However, the only way to get to Rhys is through his wife, Moira. Thrust into each other’s care, emotions once buried deep resurface, and the trio race to figure out their feelings for one another before the Devil steals David away for good�

The first book in a spellbinding and vibrant new series from The Sunday Times bestselling author of A Dowry of Blood. ]]> 301 S.T. Gibson 191520268X isa 0 to-read 3.61 2024
author: S.T. Gibson
name: isa
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 isa 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Miranda July
name: isa
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 isa 0 to-read 4.50 2020
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: isa
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
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]]> 192724951 A man lunges in front of a car. An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. On this reservation, not all is what it seems, in this new spine-chilling mythological horror from the author of Sisters of the Lost Nation.

All Noemi Broussard wanted was a fresh start. With a new boyfriend who actually treats her right and a plan to move from the reservation she grew up on—just like her beloved Uncle Louie before her—things are finally looking up for Noemi. Until the news of her boyfriend’s apparent suicide brings her world crumbling down.

But the facts about Roddy’s death just don’t add up, and Noemi isn’t the only one who suspects that something menacing might be lurking within their tribal lands.

After over a decade away, Uncle Louie has returned to the reservation, bringing with him a past full of secrets, horror, and what might be the key to determining Roddy’s true cause of death. Together, Noemi and Louie set out to find answers…but as they get closer to the truth, Noemi begins to wonder whether it might be best for some secrets to remain buried.]]> 370 Nick Medina 0593546881 isa 0 to-read 3.58 2024
author: Nick Medina
name: isa
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]> 387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X isa 0 to-read 3.74 2024
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: isa
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 62929342 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 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 so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

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? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 isa 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: isa
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 60417483 Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. ]]> 304 Louise Kennedy 0593540891 isa 0 currently-reading 3.92 2022
author: Louise Kennedy
name: isa
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/18
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 50520939
Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.

When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.

Most of them.]]> 376 Olivie Blake isa 0 currently-reading 3.56 2020
author: Olivie Blake
name: isa
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 isa 0 currently-reading 3.86 1859
author: Charles Dickens
name: isa
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> 290037
Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book of Revelation is Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.]]> 272 Rupert Thomson 0375708456 isa 0 to-read 3.63 1999
author: Rupert Thomson
name: isa
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> 19058954 179 Pepper Pace isa 0 to-read 4.40 2012
author: Pepper Pace
name: isa
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 49391708 "Fresh. . .eventful. . .with a satisfying love story underlying it all." � Foreword Clarion Reviews

Hunter needs to remember. Jazz needs to forget. They need each other to heal in this teen thriller of survivor love.

Hunter’s past is a mystery to him, erased by a doctor at the direction of his father. But memories of the secret trauma begin to surface when Hunter sees other people’s memories—visions invading his mind with stories of abuse, teen self-mutilation, rape, and forbidden sex.

His best friend Jazz has dark and disturbing memories of her own that she hides behind her sass and wit. Hunter discovers he can rescue the victims, even though he risks adding their suffering to his own.

Hunter and Jazz kiss each other’s scars and form a bond of empathy no two teens should ever need.

This book contains scenes of sexual abuse, self-mutilation, and suicide. It should not be read by teens who wish to be shielded from such harsh realities their peers may be enduring alone. Nor by anyone who desires to remain in the dark despite being in a position to shine light. However, those who suffer in private or wish to help those who do—please read this story and share its contents.

Many parts of this book are difficult to read and were very difficult to write. But there is much truth in these pages, some profoundly ugly and some beautiful in its resilience. As one character says, “I have to believe I can still love and be loved. We can’t stay broken forever.�

And they shouldn’t be unknown forever. People need to feel the pain of others.]]> 364 Brooke Skipstone 1733148825 isa 0 to-read 3.89 2019
author: Brooke Skipstone
name: isa
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12024430 A gritty, romantic modern fairy tale from the author of Break and Gone, Gone, Gone.

Be careful what you believe in.

Rudy’s life is flipped upside-down when his family moves to a remote island in a last attempt to save his sick younger brother. With nothing to do but worry, Rudy sinks deeper and deeper into loneliness and lies awake at night listening to the screams of the ocean beneath his family’s rickety house.

Then he meets Diana, who makes him wonder what he even knows about love, and Teeth, who makes him question what he knows about anything. Rudy can’t remember the last time he felt so connected to someone, but being friends with Teeth is more than a little bit complicated. He soon learns that Teeth has terrible secrets. Violent secrets. Secrets that will force Rudy to choose between his own happiness and his brother’s life.]]> 288 Hannah Moskowitz 1442465328 isa 0 to-read 3.80 2013
author: Hannah Moskowitz
name: isa
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 414788 Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomea.
The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama.]]> 214 Judith C. Brown 0195042255 isa 0 to-read 3.68 1985
author: Judith C. Brown
name: isa
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

Dear Reader:
I want to let you know that Stone Butch Blues is an anti-oppression/s novel.
As a result, it contains scenes of rape and other violence.
None of this violence is gratuitous or salacious.
Leslie]]> 308 Leslie Feinberg 1555838537 isa 0 to-read 4.52 1993
author: Leslie Feinberg
name: isa
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15881
And strike it does. For in Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor and a spirit who haunts the girls� bathroom. But then the real trouble begins � someone is turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects� Harry Potter himself!]]> 352 J.K. Rowling isa 4 4.42 1998
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/20
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 3 309 J.K. Rowling 0439554934 isa 4 4.47 1997
author: J.K. Rowling
name: isa
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/15
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 12842115 If I Stay.

When sheltered American good girl Allyson "LuLu" Healey first meets laid-back Dutch actor Willem De Ruiter at an underground performance of Twelfth Night in England, there's an undeniable spark. After just one day together, that spark bursts into a flame, or so it seems to Allyson, until the following morning, when she wakes up after a whirlwind day in Paris to discover that Willem has left. Over the next year, Allyson embarks on a journey to come to terms with the narrow confines of her life, and through Shakespeare, travel, and a quest for her almost-true-love, to break free of those confines.]]> 384 Gayle Forman 0525425918 isa 0 to-read 4.07 2013
author: Gayle Forman
name: isa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 163256 336 Andrea Dworkin 0452267935 isa 0 to-read 4.01 1981
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: isa
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 42206658 Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.

Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes “Goodbye to All This� (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and “My Suicide� (2005), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death.]]> 408 Andrea Dworkin 1635900808 isa 0 to-read 4.38 2019
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: isa
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

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

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X isa 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: Julia Armfield
name: isa
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28010569
At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.

Anthony Briggs's superb translation combines stirring, accessible prose with fidelity to Tolstoy's original, while Orlando Figes's afterword discusses the novel's vast scope and depiction of Russian identity. This edition also contains appendices, notes, a list of prominent characters and maps.]]> 1440 Leo Tolstoy 0241265541 isa 0 to-read 4.38 1869
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: isa
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1869
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 18306723 This acclaimed modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky won the PEN/ Book of the Month Club Translation Prize in 2001. Their translation is accompanied in this edition by an introduction by Richard Pevear and a preface by John Bayley. "The new and brilliantly witty translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is a must". (Lisa Appignanesi, Independent, Books of the Year). "Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy's "characters, acts, situations"". (James Wood, New Yorker).]]> 864 Leo Tolstoy 014119961X isa 0 to-read 4.25 1878
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: isa
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1878
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57850265
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.]]> 293 Sequoia Nagamatsu 0063072645 isa 0 to-read 3.81 2022
author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
name: isa
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54496088 “ImagineÌýCall Me By Your NameÌýset in Communist Poland and you'll get a sense of Jedrowski's moving debut about a consuming love affair amidst a country being torn apart.â€� Ìý—Ì�O, The Oprah Magazine


“Captivating both for its shimmering surfaces and its terrifying depths. Tomasz Jedrowski is a remarkable writer.â€� Ìý—ÌýJustin Torres, bestselling author ofÌýWe the Animals

Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of Communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of André Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this hand­some, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are ful­filled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful, natural world removed from society and its con­straints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive Communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.

Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly coveted government position. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.

Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, postwar politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski’s indelible and thought-provoking literary debut explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.]]> 191 Tomasz Jedrowski 0062890018 isa 0 to-read 4.25 2020
author: Tomasz Jedrowski
name: isa
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 isa 0 to-read 3.76 2023
author: Justin Torres
name: isa
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37173847
But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic--the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience--have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.

Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.

To have a chance at surviving—and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s under way—Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined.]]> 501 Robert Jackson Bennett 1524760374 isa 0 to-read 4.16 2018
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: isa
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25733998
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.

Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.� With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.]]> 159 James Baldwin 1101907746 isa 0 to-read 4.36 1956
author: James Baldwin
name: isa
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

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

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

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 208 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 isa 0 to-read 4.22 1995
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: isa
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6334
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 isa 0 to-read 3.85 2005
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: isa
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50716604
Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.]]> 130 Tove Ditlevsen 0241391911 isa 0 to-read 3.96 1968
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: isa
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61087954 115 Matthieu Simard 1910312843 isa 5 five-stars
utterly captivating. i read this in two sittings within seven hours during a day with both work and school. from the very beginning i was intrigued. an interesting exploration of a couples grief, curiosity, and selfishness. characters to love all around. you learn why they get no peace and why they need peace but still want to know more. in the 125 pages you do learn the “more� that you want. everything ties up perfectly, neat and beautiful. ]]> 3.73 2017
author: Matthieu Simard
name: isa
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: five-stars
review:
five stars. maybe six.

utterly captivating. i read this in two sittings within seven hours during a day with both work and school. from the very beginning i was intrigued. an interesting exploration of a couples grief, curiosity, and selfishness. characters to love all around. you learn why they get no peace and why they need peace but still want to know more. in the 125 pages you do learn the “more� that you want. everything ties up perfectly, neat and beautiful.
]]> 43398196
Akutagawa-award-winning author Yū Miri uses her outsider’s perspective as a Zainichi (Korean-Japanese) writer to craft a novel of utmost importance to this moment, a powerful rebuke to the Imperial system and a sensitive, deeply felt depiction of the lives of Japan’s most vulnerable people.]]> 168 Yū Miri 1911284169 isa 0 dnf, to-read 3.46 2014
author: YÅ« Miri
name: isa
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: dnf, to-read
review:

]]> 61767292
Nothing will stand in her way, not even the captain of the hockey team, Nate Hawkins.

Nate’s focus as team captain is on keeping his team on the ice. Which is tricky when a facilities mishap means they are forced to share a rink with the figure skating team—including Anastasia, who clearly can’t stand him.

But when Anastasia’s skating partner faces an uncertain future, she may have to look to Nate to take her shot.

Sparks fly, but Anastasia isn’t worried . . . because she could never like a hockey player, right?]]> 447 Hannah Grace isa 0 to-read, want-to-hateread 3.75 2022
author: Hannah Grace
name: isa
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: to-read, want-to-hateread
review:

]]> 61272703 A highly anticipated new novel exploring what it means to be a woman in her many forms—daughter, friend, partner, lover, and mother.

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

What will she sacrifice from her old life to make room for a new one? What fires will she be forced to extinguish, and which will keep burning? Old Flame is a story about the essential—and often existential—choices that define a woman’s life at every level, from which dress to wear to when to have a child to how to be in the world.]]> 320 Molly Prentiss 1501121588 isa 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Molly Prentiss
name: isa
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh isa 3 recced-by-friends
boy, was this hard to stomach at times! i’ll be truthful i took a whole star off for that. with rape and incest, you really couldn’t get much worse. the religiousness of this all, seeing each character’s interpretation of what they have been indoctrinated into knowing from their elders or the church. everyone had strikingly different opinions on god despite all being lapvonians. watching the downfall of many during christmas. you know those parts of the book where your heart starts racing just because you KNOW it’s the climax? yeah. that’s how the entire “winter� chapter felt.

watching marek slowly change after being pulled into the world of high class living was also great, to see his privilege grow and learn the opinions that others around him felt. he went from doing things specifically to piss off jude so that he’d be beat for god to pity him to well�

grigor was boring. sorry your grandkids died or whatever but i didn’t like him or his name. ]]> 3.53 2022
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: isa
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/07
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves: recced-by-friends
review:
★★★☆� 3.8 out of 5

boy, was this hard to stomach at times! i’ll be truthful i took a whole star off for that. with rape and incest, you really couldn’t get much worse. the religiousness of this all, seeing each character’s interpretation of what they have been indoctrinated into knowing from their elders or the church. everyone had strikingly different opinions on god despite all being lapvonians. watching the downfall of many during christmas. you know those parts of the book where your heart starts racing just because you KNOW it’s the climax? yeah. that’s how the entire “winter� chapter felt.

watching marek slowly change after being pulled into the world of high class living was also great, to see his privilege grow and learn the opinions that others around him felt. he went from doing things specifically to piss off jude so that he’d be beat for god to pity him to well�

grigor was boring. sorry your grandkids died or whatever but i didn’t like him or his name.
]]> 17259690
Signing a contract with the PSU Foxes is the last thing a guy like Neil should do. The team is high profile and he doesn't need sports crews broadcasting pictures of his face around the nation. His lies will hold up only so long under this kind of scrutiny and the truth will get him killed.

But Neil's not the only one with secrets on the team. One of Neil's new teammates is a friend from his old life, and Neil can't walk away from him a second time. Neil has survived the last eight years by running. Maybe he's finally found someone and something worth fighting for.]]> 237 Nora Sakavic 1301529044 isa 0 to-read 4.03 2013
author: Nora Sakavic
name: isa
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.ÌýYet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 isa 0 to-read 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: isa
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24280 1463 Victor Hugo 0451525264 isa 0 to-read 4.19 1862
author: Victor Hugo
name: isa
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1862
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1617 Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.]]> 120 Elie Wiesel 0374500010 isa 3 4.38 1956
author: Elie Wiesel
name: isa
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 59586261 The prequel to We Were Liars takes readers back to the story of another summer, another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.

A windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
A hungry ocean, churning with secrets and sorrow.
A fiery, addicted heiress. An irresistible, unpredictable boy.
A summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes.

Welcome back to the Sinclair family.
They were always liars.]]> 299 E. Lockhart 059356880X isa 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: E. Lockhart
name: isa
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
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]]> 99561 Before. Miles “Pudge� Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps� even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . .
After. Nothing is ever the same.]]> 221 John Green 1435249151 isa 4 3.97 2005
author: John Green
name: isa
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins 0439023483 isa 5 4.34 2008
author: Suzanne Collins
name: isa
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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]]> 61439040
Alternate cover edition can be found here.]]> 368 George Orwell 0452284236 isa 4 4.21 1949
author: George Orwell
name: isa
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1949
rating: 4
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]]> 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 isa 3 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: isa
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 3
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]]> 25853025
This edition of Romeo and Juliet is edited with an introduction by Peter Holland and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 176 William Shakespeare 0143128574 isa 3 3.88 1597
author: William Shakespeare
name: isa
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1597
rating: 3
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]]> 56079097 The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review.

"By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." -- Time.

"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- Newsweek.]]> 244 Sylvia Plath isa 3 4.01 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: isa
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/29
date added: 2023/12/07
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the racism got a little crazy at some points but plath’s writing made me want to move to new england and try to toaster bath (in a good way)
]]> 34369803
As a young actor at an elite conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same characters onstage and off � villain, hero, temptress � though he was always a supporting role. But when the teachers change the casting, a good-natured rivalry turns ugly, and the plays spill dangerously over into real life.

When tragedy strikes, one of the seven friends is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless...]]> 422 M.L. Rio 1785656473 isa 5 4.29 2017
author: M.L. Rio
name: isa
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2023/12/07
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]]> 59788021 It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me.


It’s in the water where she first sees a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.


As their relationship deepens, life at Sailors Beach offers her the stability she has been craving as the daughter of two drifters—a loving but impulsive mother and an itinerant father. But the arrival of Maeve, a friend from Jude’s past, threatens to rock their fragile, newfound intimacy. And when she witnesses something she doesn’t fully understand, she finds herself questioning everything—about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants.


A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.]]> 271 Madelaine Lucas 1953534724 isa 0 to-read 3.86 2023
author: Madelaine Lucas
name: isa
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 25614898 When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,� as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life� into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.]]> 229 Paul Kalanithi 081298840X isa 0 to-read 4.37 2016
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: isa
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/07
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]]>