en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:44:17 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 216497043
Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.]]> 352 Laurie Woolever 0063327600 Scott 4 3.58
author: Laurie Woolever
name: Scott
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
Really loved big chunks of Laurie Woolever's memoir, and laughed out loud a bunch, and certainly identified with her whole "I'm an alcoholic" deal. The basics: fled her semi-miserable small town life in Minnesota (?) and showed up in NYC without a plan, and was a bit of a disaster but kept plugging away, and, by circumstance and coincidence, worked as personal assistant to both Mario Battali and Anthony Bourdain, traveling the world with the latter. Her intelligence and talent as a writer also gave her a nice career in journalism. In addition to all the booze (she's now sober), she also smoked a ton of weed and had lots of depressing-sounding sex. And had a kid! A life can have many chapters.
]]> 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Scott 2 4.13 2023
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Scott
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:
Wow totally didn't��get the critical accolades for this. It's all world-building, no narrative, and the scenes that do progress��the story (such as it is), are borderline ludicrous. The farmers market scene in particular. Plus the ideas aren't that provocative or new. Oh well.�� ��
]]> 61966364 A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing��relationship between fire and humankind

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia,��shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a��riveting journey��through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the��unprecedented devastation that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters.��His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.]]> 432 John Vaillant 1524732850 Scott 5 4.32 2023
author: John Vaillant
name: Scott
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
Smart, gripping, thorough, passionate portrait of the insane��climate-change-driven Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, a city in otherwise remote Alberta that only exists because oil companies are essentially strip mining the land to get at the bitumen embedded in the rock, an expensive and violent process that doesn't need to exist, resource-wise, except that��it makes a very small amount of people a ton of money. So the climate-change accelerators��get torched��by their petard or something. Author John Vaillant does a superb job of tick-tocking the harrowing day or two when the world exploded up there, and explains precisely why it's all so crazy and the product of greed and greed alone, and gives a history��of everyone ignoring the science for almost a century now which is why we are all truly fucked. Great book.�� ��
]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Scott 5 4.08 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Scott
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:
Very sweet, smart, and, sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny novel about a literal alien, Adina, born to human single mom who grows up and lives a life and sends back observations about Earth and human behaviour to her home planet(ish). Charming and moving! Starts off a bit metaphorical seeming, but quickly becomes grounded. Bonus: a bunch of it is set in NYC. Really loved Adina, as anyone with heart will.�� �� �� ��
]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk�� city of “old traditions and new machinery,�� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning�� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Scott 5 4.52 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Scott
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves:
review:
Ta-Nehisi Coates is so smart, and such a lucid writer, that I think everyone should always just read whatever he gives us. But The Message, basically three long essays with an intertwining theme (how the stories we are told and tell ourselves influence and distort how we view reality), is particularly relevant right this second because the final (and longest, and most compelling) section is about his trip to Palestine-Israel in 2023. Powerful, important stuff, all of it.
]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Scott 4 4.16 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Scott
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
Long, fun, cheesy thriller(ish) set in an Upstate NY summer camp owned by a Gilded-Age-style rich family whose children keep going missing. There are too many characters with bland American names for me to keep track of, and the timeline jumps around kind of randomly, but by the second half I had my bearings. If you're in the mood for a page-turner...
]]> 211004894
"Kari Ferrell’s memoir is a zippy, intimate account of low-level trickery before the era of scams fully erupted." —The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

New York City’s indie sleaze scene had found its newest celebrity—just as Kari found herself in a heap of trouble. Jail time, riots, bad checks, and an explosion of internet infamy and fetishization put her name in the spotlight. Beyond the gossip and Gawker posts, there’s a side to Kari the media never saw—until now.]]> 288 Kari Ferrell 1250288223 Scott 4 3.35 2025
author: Kari Ferrell
name: Scott
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:
This��entertaining, fast-paced, and surprisingly��(?) thoughtful memoir��by the mid-aughts, NYC-based-blogs sensation "the Hipster Grifter" is actually very light on her Brooklyn scamming era (basically, she'd pick up guys at hipster hangs, go home with them, and steal random stuff like iPads or maybe a bit of cash), and heavy on, for example, her experience as an adopted Korean kid in Mormon Utah, and her early "criminal" career, also in Utah, during which her victims were mostly her friends (she did some fucked up things during this period, which she readily admits and regrets), and her six months or so in jail (this is maybe the best part of the book), and her subsquent attempt to live a normal, under-the-radar life afterward. So if you're looking for a salacious, reality-TV read, this isn't it! But Ferrell is clearly (self-)perceptive and charismatic, and you can't help but root for her.�� ����
]]> 30090925
Now, after a decade of striving, the two are finally celebrating the release of their first full-length feature, which transforms Mel’s difficult childhood into a provocative and visually daring work of art. The toast of the indie film scene, they stand at the cusp of making it big. But with their success come doubt and destruction, cracks in their relationship threatening the delicate balance of their partnership. Sharon begins to feel expendable, suspecting that the ever-more raucous Mel is the real artist. During a trip to Sharon’s home state of Kentucky, the only other partner she has ever truly known—her troubled, charismatic childhood best friend, Teddy—reenters her life, and long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.]]> 369 Kayla Rae Whitaker Scott 5 ]]> 3.94 2017
author: Kayla Rae Whitaker
name: Scott
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves:
review:
I can't remember who or what prompted me to pick up this 2017 first novel about two best friends/creative partners, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses, who meet at art school and... get up into a lot of stuff across many years and locations. But I'm glad I did! The Animators definitely has some debut jitters, with plot points and vibes occasionally overplayed, but for the most part Kayla Rae Whitaker does an excellent job, with both the narrative structure (every time I was worried it would fall into cliche, she veered into something new), the pacing (rapid!) and the emotional core. There's such a sweetness running through it, even when things and people suck, and you can't help but fall for/root for these two women. Eagerly await your next book, Kayla Rae!

]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 576 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Scott 5 4.52 2024
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Scott
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves:
review:
Adam Higginbotham, previously seen in the brilliant Midnight in Chernobyl, is clearly great at taking massively populated, highly technical stories and making them both scientifically understandable and extremely human. The centerpiece of Challenger is, obviously, the space shuttle's explosion in 1986 that killed seven astronauts, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who has won the hearts of America in the months leading up to the fateful launch. I saw it live (not in school like millions of kids; I was 22) and it was shocking. Higginbotham does an incredible job of tick-tocking those few preceding days, and the actual explosion, and the immediate aftermath. But Challenger also functions as an history of the entire space shuttle program, and how and why it evolved from the Apollo program. AND, perhaps most important, he shows why years and DECADES of individual hubris and greed, within NASA and by the mfers getting rich at government-contracted manufacturers, are to blame for the whole thing. Really interesting read, with an appropriate amount of emotion at the end.
]]> 205363936 In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, shines a light in every corner of New York City.Boom! A June morning on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Suddenly, where a five-story building had stood is nothing but fuming low hills of rubble, the cars parked in front pancaked and coated in ash. Sirens. Havoc. Confusion. Destruction. And people missing.Richard Price, our greatest chronicler of the city today, describes the effect of the disaster on the outer and inner lives of a rich and compelling group of characters. Anthony Walker is pulled from the rubble and, miraculously, survives, to find himself inspired by a religious sense of mission. Royal Lyons, who owns a failing funeral parlor, discovers a new lease on life. And Mary Roe, a hard-bitten NYPD detective, embarks on a personal quest to find a man who is missing.Price's first novel since the bestselling Lush Life presents a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and incredible drama, Lazarus Man is a compelling work of suspense and social vision by one of our preeminent writers.]]> 352 Richard Price 0374168156 Scott 3 3.46 2024
author: Richard Price
name: Scott
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
Richard Price has written some great hard-boiled-ish novels. Clockers, Lush Life, Freedomland... I really enjoyed all of these. Lazarus Man though? Set in East Harlem after a building collapses and kills a few people? Yeah not as good. Maybe it's the no-stakes intrigue? Or the didn't-believe-it-for-second love story? I liked the very end I guess. But mostly it made me wish I were reading a new Ray Carney jam by Colson Whitehead.
]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 Scott 5 4.01 2024
author: Griffin Dunne
name: Scott
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:
Griffin Dunne starred in one of my favorite late-teenager movies, American Werewolf in London, and his sister, Dominique, was the elder sister in one of my other favorite movies during that time, Poltergeist. So it's weird that I don't remember��*at all* the horrible��sad story of Dominique's MURDER and the subsequent��acquittal��(basically) of her killer. In Dunne's memoir The Friday Afternoon Club he tells the story of his sister concisely and well and, on a much lighter note, also recounts��plenty of wild adventures with and without his family and his best friend Carrie Fisher and lots of other big Hollywood names. Nicely done.��
]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Scott 5 3.88 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Scott
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves:
review:
A series of interconnected stories starring the worst people you've ever met. I say interconnected because each one has a cameo from someone that appeared somewhere else, but the protagonist in each couldn't be more different. Except that they're all horrible. Themes are loneliness and horniness and alienation and isolation and hate and pain and gender and capitalism and identity and the perils of the online world. Tony Tulathimutte is a smart, propulsive, and often very funny writer, but I'm glad this was relatively short. These people suck.
]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”��New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Scott 5 3.50 2024
author: Emily Witt
name: Scott
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves:
review:
Glorious, evocative, immersive portrait of I guess you call the rave scene in Bushwick and environs in the mid 2010s--the music, the drugs, and the people, many of whom were "old" (in their 30s), queer, left wing, and not really into the usual club kid posturing--from New Yorker writer Emily Witt, a brief era that effectively ended (or, at least, was transformed by) the pandemic. I loved all this, even though I've been clean and sober��for 25 years--Witt is a patient, generous guide and a terrific writer--not least��because I live literally right around the corner from her apartments during that time. Witt's trip to Berlin, and the legendary��Berghain, was fun and wild too. There's kind of unexpected change in the narrative about two-thirds of the way through, which makes sense since the WHOLE WORLD also had that happen in the spring of 2020, and the book becomes more about how murderous cops (and that horror-show��Rittenhouse) sparked the early-pandemic BLM protests, as well as Witt's increasingly disturbing relationship with her boyfriend. It's all very specific��to a time and place, and makes for a great read.����
]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Scott 4 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Scott
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves:
review:
Two brothers, 14 years (?) apart, Peter (a suave if arrogant and often drunk lawyer) and Ivan (a geeky chess kid) are complicatedly in love with women (Peter with two, Ivan with one) in Dublin and its environs, and fight viciously with one another, and mourn their father's death. I like Rooney's inner-monologue style here, especially��with the two self-absorbed men, though the Yoda-ish sentence��structures got silly after a while. And although she's laugh-out-loud funny more times than I remember happening in her other books, Rooney didn't make me cry in Intermezzo until the very, very end. Basically: my third favorite Sally Rooney novel!��
]]> 20694952 Nixonland: a dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.

In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term—until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixon’s resignation “our long national nightmare is over”—but then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new way—as one more nation among nations, no more providential than any other—the pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored this chastened new national mood.

Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed him—until, amazingly, it started to look like he just might win. He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in America’s Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America’s greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flag—or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?]]> 880 Rick Perlstein 1476782415 Scott 5 4.22 2014
author: Rick Perlstein
name: Scott
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:
The indefatigable Rick Perslstein's third volume in his four-volume series about the rise of the "conservative" (read: racist, fascist) movement in America, 800 pages taking us from, basically, Nixon's landslide in 1972 to the rise of Reagan and his shockingly��narrow defeat by the incumbent Ford in '76 as the Republican nominee. I was nine to thirteen during this time period and don't��remember Reagan being such a newsmaker back then at all, which is weird because so much else is familiar: Patty Heart and the SLA, the bicentennial, the Watergate hearings, the cynical framing of the return of, like, several hundred POWs as "we won the war in Vietnam," Jimmy Carter's out-of-nowhere victory as the Democratic candidate (Carter comes across much more sleazy than most Dem stans think of him today), the busing riots in Boston, the weird early 1970s self-help "religions" like est, WIN, the energy crisis, etc, etc. Invisible Bridge spends about 250 pages as a straightforward Reagan biography, which is interesting and insightful, but also is a lot of time to have to spend with the guy. What's most depressing is how much of the political psyche then--whiny white people acting like victims--feels similar to today's hellscape. And since it was pubbed in 2014, Perlstein couldn't��have picked his examples in an effort to mirror the Trump era.�� �� ��
]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Scott 5 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Scott
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves:
review:
Really, really loved this novel about addiction, family secrets, US imperialism, love, pain, sacrifice, freaky dreams, the immigrant experience, other things too. I laughed and I cried! Akbar is such a good writer who doesn't sacrifice pacing and humor and drama for his terrific sentences and creative narrative structure. I wish the Brooklyn/NYC scenes weren't so jarringly geo-incorrect, and I didn't understand the very ending, but that's ok, this is a great book.��
]]> 199798198
The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors�� camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.]]> 512 Kevin Fedarko 1501183052 Scott 4 4.22 2024
author: Kevin Fedarko
name: Scott
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves:
review:
Journalist��Kevin Fedarko and his photog buddy Peter McBride attempt to walk the entire, 750-mile "length" (there are *tons* of tributaries; it's not a straight shot) of the Grand Canyon, probably��the single most famous American natural/geographic wonder AND YET also, clearly, a place that I and probably you actually knew extremely little about. Like who knew how perilous it was? And that it snowed there a LOT? And the amount of times you have to go up and down cliffs, oh my god. Fedarko is a good, even poetic, descriptive/outdoors writer, and A Walk In the Park is one of the few books I wish I wasn't reading on the Kindle so I could see McBride's photos of the places he was talking about (I went to a bookstore afterwards and checked them out). Only complaint: his whole "we're so unprepared and dumb and incompetent" schtick of the first, like, 150 pages, wears really thin. Whether true or not, I'm glad he dropped that.�� ��
]]> 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 Scott 3 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Scott
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
I blame the editors for the sloppy storytelling here (there are so many continuity errors) and the generally lazy plotting (the far-fetched coincidences of people running into each other randomly in big cities are charming at first, but get ridiculous after a while), and the unlikely character motivations and generic scene-setting, which is too bad because Khong is a propulsive writer who has some interesting ideas. I finished this multi-generational saga about identity and family that takes us from Mao-era China to San Francisco in 2030, but idk, it wasn't for me.
]]> 28007895
When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. ��Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive. Yet, as the author writes, hope is "persistent and cunning".��������

This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.]]> 256 Hisham Matar 034580774X Scott 5 4.15 2016
author: Hisham Matar
name: Scott
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves:
review:
I saw this on that Times list and remembered that I forgot to read it back in 2016 when it won the Pulitzer. What��an amazing��book. The Return is Hisham Matar's memoir of sorts, mostly about��how, when he was 19 and living in London, his father, a venerated (by the resistance) and feared (by Gaddafi and his regime) opposition leader in Libya��was disappeared, and the subsequent decades during which Matar tried to find out where his father was, if he was alive or dead, what happened in the notorious Abu Salim prison. Libya during these years also went through a revolution, then a civil war, and Matar's very close, very extended family suffered and fought and lived on and died through it all. Parts of the story are extremely upsetting, and Matar, a poet, is adept at using��very precise (and often quite lovely) language to describe his feelings, his actions, and the events that shook his beloved family and homeland. Powerful stuff, all of it.�� �� �� ��
]]> 200028726 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 240 Catherine Newman 0063345161 Scott 5 3.55 2024
author: Catherine Newman
name: Scott
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves:
review:
Short, lovely novel with a lot of heart and witty banter about a family (menopausal mom, kind cheerful dad, adult (gay) daughter, charming adult son, son's girlfriend, and, for two days, grandma and grandpa) on a week-long summer vacation in Cape Cod, staying at house they've rented on this week for more than 20 years. Author Catherine Newman totally nails that familiar summer house/town vibe, and the family dynamics (everyone talks like a podcast--it's all too clever by at least 50%--but the relentless cleverness doesn't grate at only 200 or so pages), and though stuff happens (physically, emotionally) the stakes never seem high enough to produce any real reader anxiety. And you'll probably cry towards the end. Excellent summer read.
]]> 199514774
How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? It’s an everyday act, easily taken for granted, but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. Banquets were held just so guests could enjoy the novelty of eggs, butter, and apples that had been preserved for months in cold storage—and demonstrate that such zombie foods were not deadly. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching an entirely new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but also seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.

In FROSTBITE, New Yorker contributor and co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers with her on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting such off-the-beaten-track landmarks as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s OJ reserves. Today, more than three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but as Twilley soon discovers, the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food, extending the distance between producers and consumers and redefining what “fresh�� really means. More importantly, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a U.S.-style cold chain, Twilley asks, can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we? A deeply-researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, FROSTBITE makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.]]> 400 Nicola Twilley 0735223289 Scott 4 4.19 2024
author: Nicola Twilley
name: Scott
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves:
review:
A fun, illuminating, well researched piece of, at times gonzo, at times historical, journalism from Nicola Twilley, best known I guess for her podcast(?). The whole concept of the "cold chain"--basically a frozen/refrigerated supply chain that gives most Americans most of what they eat--was new to me, though also of course that's how it must work. And there is a ton of ingenuity at play, from the first ThermoKing trucks to the five-layer plastic bags that your greens come in at Whole Foods, etc. But at what cost do we have easy year-round access to bananas, tomatoes, meat, blueberries, salmon? The domination of agribusiness, the massive carbon��footprint of running all those freezers and, a lot of times, straight up shitty food. Is it the only��way to feed people???? Maybe, maybe not.��
]]> 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 Scott 4 3.53 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Scott
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:
Miranda July once again makes me care about and laugh��with and root for a character whose initial impression��is one of a pathetic passivity, an unnamed 45-year-old semi-famous female��artist��who leaves her husband and six-year-old child for a cross-country drive/vacation from LA to��NYC and makes it as far a depressing��motel 30 minutes away. Where she stays for like three weeks. Because she falls in lust/love with a rando. That's the setup, which has many sharp and funny moments, but the fallout, in which she discovers the unadvertised horrors of perimenopause, is even better. There's a ton of explicit��sex here--it's very porny--and wise ruminations on what it means--physically, hormonally--to be a woman, and a mother, and a partner in a relationship, and the structure of the novel is pretty cool as well. It's easy to understand why everyone's talking about this.�� �� ��
]]> 30038960
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015).]]> 294 Bill Hayes 1620404931 Scott 4 4.40 2017
author: Bill Hayes
name: Scott
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves:
review:
My younger daughter recommended this memoir, first pubbed way, way back in 2017, about how author Bill Hayes moved to New York City from San Francisco, fell in love with the place (his life is very Chelsea/West Village-centric, fwiw, but he does enjoy the subway which, points in his favor), then met and fell in love with an older man (Hayes is like 50) who turned out to be Oliver Sacks. So most of the book is about those two things: NYC and its people (yay!), and his amazing love affair with Sacks. It's very sweet, very charming, very New York, albeit as seen and lived from a privileged perch.
]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Scott 5 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Scott
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/13
date added: 2024/06/13
shelves:
review:
Gut punch of a novel set in Missouri on the eve of the American Civil War that has a great marketing hook--Huck Finn, but from Jim's POV--but it doesn't really matter how little you remember of Mark Twain's classic or even if you ever read it at all (I may have only read the Classics Illustrated version in, like 1972). The pacing is Fury Road fast--so much happens plot-wise, most of it horrifying--but it's not action movie/thriller: Everett is a brilliant writer who fills the story with sharp and damning observations about racism, both individual and systemic, same as it is today, AND conveys what it *feels* like to be a slave (and/or a free Black person in America), like on an emotional level. Extremely satisfying ending, too.
]]> 155685405 ��
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books�� Splinters enters a new realm.
��
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents�� complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
��
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon�� (NPR).]]> 272 Leslie Jamison 0316374881 Scott 5 3.79 2024
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Scott
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/06/06
shelves:
review:
I love Leslie Jamison's work and I think this is my favorite book of hers yet, mostly because, unlike, say, Recovering or Empathy Exams, there's almost no long academic-ish asides here (she a professor as well as a writer), which I'm often not sharp enough to follow, and instead we get pure emotion. And man did this kick up a lot of stuff in me! The "story" here is she meets C, falls in love, has a daughter, gets divorced, falls in love with someone else, gets her heart broken, goes on dates, and single-parents her way through most of the early pandemic. But in her typically brilliant, unflinchingly-honest style, Jamison delves often and well into what it all *feels* like: love, sex, being an alcoholic, being a mom, being a daughter, being a woman, being a writer. Sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced any of those things.
]]> 157981682 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Scott 4 3.44 2024
author: Kelly Link
name: Scott
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/31
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves:
review:
Lots of great moments in Kelly Link's epic (660 pages) novel about, basically, three teenagers who come back from the dead, and the whole mythology of surrounding their journey, and what happens over the course of a fews days (?) to their families, friends, and entire New England coastal town as great battles get fought and much weirdness ensues. Like everyone can turn into animals. It reminded me a bit of Stephen King? The best parts are when Link let's these kids act their age, and focus on typical teenage stuff and emotions even as nothing sense any more (because they were dead and now they are not). They are very horny! I enjoyed the fantasical mythos parts less, but that's not surprising.
]]> 62329959
Instead of focusing on one service, like HBO, Pandora’s Box asks, “What did HBO do besides give us The Sopranos?�� The answer: It gave us a revolution. Biskind bites off a big chunk of entertainment history, following HBO from its birth to maturity, moving on to the basic cablers like FX and AMC, and ending with the streamers and their wars, pitting Netflix against Amazon Prime Video, Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple TV, and Paramount.

Since the creative and business sides of TV are thoroughly entwined, Biskind examines both, and the interplay between them. Through frank and shockingly intimate interviews with creators and executives, Pandora’s Box investigates the dynamic interplay of commerce and art through the lens the game-changing shows they aired—not only old warhorses like The Sopranos, but recent shows like The White Lotus, Succession, and Yellow- (both -stone and -jackets)—as windows into the byzantine practices of the players as they use money and guile to destroy their competitors. With its long view and short takes—riveting snapshots of behind-the-scenes mischief��Pandora’s Box is the only book you’ll need to read to understand what’s on your small screen and how it got there.]]> 0 Peter Biskind 0241443903 Scott 3 3.48
author: Peter Biskind
name: Scott
average rating: 3.48
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:
I think I really liked Easy Riders etc., Peter Biskind's chronicle of how the auteurs of the early 1970s saved a bloated Hollywood (until Spielberg and Lucas ruined��it again), though I don't really remember it. Nor do I know if it would stand up! Either way, I had less fun with Pandora's Box, his chronicle of how HBO saved a bloated... Network TV landscape? But then streaming ruined it all over again. The broad strokes of the story are interesting in a cultural history sort of way, but the book spends more time among the industry's asshole execs than I wanted to. And then he gets weirdly snide in the last couple of sections? I don't know maybe I'm just less emotionally invested in these shows.��
]]> 150778765 In Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and knack for social observation to the world of work.

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid�� status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.]]> 288 Adelle Waldman 132402044X Scott 5 3.56 2024
author: Adelle Waldman
name: Scott
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/03
shelves:
review:
Loved Adelle Waldman's novel about a big crew of Target(ish) warehouse and stock workers in a depressed/depressing rust belt town and how they deal with the relentless pain and humiliations of capitalism. The cast is large and so well-drawn that even I could keep track of them, the societal indictments are sharp, there's humor and heart, and the narrative, described elsewhere and accurately as a caper, is surprisingly propulsive.
]]> 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Scott 5 3.84 2024
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Scott
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves:
review:
I'm a Sloane Crosley fan, I think I've read all her essay collections and admire both her writing��and her attitude and think that we probably would have been friends��if we had worked together.��Maybe we still will be friends one day! Anyway, this is her best book imo, a devastating (but also endearing and even sometimes amusing) portrait of her best friend Russell and the many stages of grief she went through after he died in 2019. It happened a month after her West Village apartment was burgled and all of her jewelry was stolen, and these two losses/violations overlap in her mind and emotions. And then the pandemic hits. Crosley is so smart and observant and funny and if there was ever someone you wanted to go on this journey with, it's her.��
]]> 123033397
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.]]> 273 Michael Cunningham 0399591346 Scott 3 3.50 2023
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Scott
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/19
date added: 2024/04/19
shelves:
review:
I like the structure of Michael Cunningham's short but dense-with-emotion Day: the action, such that it is, takes place on the same day, April 5, in three consecutive years. That those three years are 2019, 2020, 2021, and the setting (for the first two years) is in Fort Greene, and the main characters are a fairly stereotypical Brooklyn "liberal" family (wife, husband, son, daughter, gay uncle, "cool" uncle), gives you an idea of what's going to go down. Namely, lots of self-absorbed grousing and early pandemic freaking out. The last day is set upstate. These people do not handle any of this well. Cunningham is pretty brilliant at making small observations about human interactions that make you go "I've never thought of it that way but that's exactly right," and he's a very clean writer, but I was glad when this was over and I didn't have to hang out with these people anymore.
]]> 61358585 A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America--from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.

Following Winner's unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley's subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.]]> 233 Kerry Howley 0525655492 Scott 5 3.76 2023
author: Kerry Howley
name: Scott
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves:
review:
Incredible book. Kerry Howley's deep dive into the Deep State stars the likes of Edward Snowden, Joe Biggs, John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and especially and most revealingly (and infuriatingly), Reality Winner, people I had no idea I wanted to read more about until I read Bottoms Up. But it's not just a reportorial tour-de-force; Howley is lively and intelligent and her insights into what it all means, re in particular, privacy and power, feel fresh and vital. Also it's very funny in parts? Highly recommended, though it will definitely piss you off.
]]> 193759650
By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.]]> 304 Lisa Ko 059354210X Scott 5 3.18 2024
author: Lisa Ko
name: Scott
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves:
review:
Loved this novel about three first-generationers who meet as tweens in the 1970s and, 70 years later, struggle to survive in a nightmare (though plausible!) future version of New York City. That's simplifying the plot, which takes plenty of twists, and provides plenty of scenery for such an economically-told (300 pages) book, but in many ways the point here are the emotions and vibes. If you spent any time in the East Village in the '80s you will recognize Lisa Ko's landscape: the clubs and diners and squat houses, the literal riots and community gardens. One of the main protagonists, Giselle Chin, becomes a mildly famous performance artist (one of her works is the Memory Piece of the title), and Ko does a great job bringing *that* world to life too. And the final section, set in 2050 or so? Bleak as hell. I loved Ko's Leavers, also.
]]> 173404158
You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer,�� The �� Village �� Voice ��was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the�� Voice ’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.��
��
With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller,��former ��Voice�� writer��Tricia Romano��pays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. With interviews featuring post-punk band, Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in this definitive oral history, Romano��tells the story of journalism, New York City and American culture—and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.]]> 608 Tricia Romano 1541736397 Scott 5 4.24
author: Tricia Romano
name: Scott
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves:
review:
Hugely entertaining��oral history of the Village Voice, which also functions��as a memoir of sorts of NYC from the 1960s into the 20teens... so, basically, my whole life! And if you, like me, read the Voice through all those years, and remember those great writers (or, at least. used the classified, or found out about��concerts, or gawked at the porno-movie ads when you were nine years old), you will probably��love this book too. There's a tinge of nostalgia for sure, for a bygone era in journalism and for a city that no longer exists, but there's plenty��column inches, so to speak, given over to the Voice's often toxic workplace filled with screaming and literal fights, as well as the racism, misogyny, and anti-gay-ness that was surprisingly prevalent.�� �� �� �� ��
]]> 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 Scott 3 3.43 2019
author: Mona Awad
name: Scott
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
My elder daughter is a big Mona Awad fan and, while I agree that she's a great writer, Bunny was too surreal / A24 for me. I did enjoy the beginning, though, until everything became seriously unhinged.
]]> 86512061
Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father’s confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger—a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men—ricocheting from experience to experience until  a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother as she descends into dementia, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father, whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer.

With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.]]> 277 Alice Carrière 1954118295 Scott 4 3.98 2023
author: Alice Carrière
name: Scott
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/04
date added: 2024/03/04
shelves:
review:
A solid entry into the totally-fucked-up childhood (and young adulthood) genre of memoir, set mostly in the 1990s. Author Alice Carriere's mom was Jennifer Bartlett, a rich and famous artist who lived in an insane townhouse on Charles Street; her dad is the European-famous actor and activist Mathieu Carrière. Neither one of them conformed to any sort of standard, loving, protective, safe, sane style of parenting, and Alice was a mess: cutting, way way way way over medicated for various psych diagnoses, self-destructive in her relationships, lonely and isolated. And then she lost any sense of who she was? Like where she ended and the world began? It's a painful read for sure, especially if you have any personal experience in any of these areas, but, you know... the fact that she finished the book and published it tells you the ending is hopeful for her.
]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 Scott 5 3.82 2023
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Scott
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves:
review:
Part two of Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy, a propulsive, sort-of crime thriller deal but told with the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning flair (and humor), and it's just as good as the first, which I guess you don't *need* to read to enjoy this but they're both so awesome you might as well. Crook Manifesto is set in the early- mid-1970s, when Harlem, like the rest of NYC, was not in great shape. Arson, in particular, is destroying homes and lives and neighborhoods, but Whitehead is quick to point out that much of the destruction is systemic, driven by corrupt officials and wealthy landlords. Anyway, it's always a pleasure to hang out with furniture salesman (and fence middleman) Ray Carney and his brutal "cousin" Pepper, and all the various Harlem lowlifes and swells, and, of course, in the city itself during that era, which Whitehead recreates with beautiful, borderline-nostalgic accuracy. Can't wait for the third.
]]> 56769577
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.

Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.]]> 308 Mary Roach 1324001933 Scott 4 3.81 2021
author: Mary Roach
name: Scott
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves:
review:
Mary Roach writes breezily entertaining, often humorous, and well-reported books on a specific (though broad) area of scientific inquiry that are packed with interesting bits of information that I forget immediately but enjoy reading about anyway. Stiff was about death and dead bodies, Spook about the afterlife, Bonk about sex. And, her latest, Fuzz, is about when animals break the law. Less glibly, how humans deal with animals with whom they're forced to interact against their will. Think elephants killing villagers in India. Black bears eating garbage (and dogs) in Aspen. Crows eating corn that a farmer would prefer to make money off of. Stoats (an invasive species) killing flightless birds (a native species) in New Zealand. Humans, of course, are to blame in all cases, but also, equally of course, they feel like it's the animal that's the problem, which usually means death for the latter.
]]> 60806778 From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.]]> 896 Stephen Markley 1982123095 Scott 5 4.20 2023
author: Stephen Markley
name: Scott
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves:
review:
I actually bought (downloaded) this climate-change/fascism-near-future dystopian novel without knowing much about it, and after reading for a while I was like "wait how am I still on just 1%?" and then I checked and realized this thing is freaking 900 pages long! But also it flew by! And was so horrifying! And I was sorry to be done with it even after three+ weeks living in this world! Sure there are some overlong wonky parts--Stephen Markley seems equally interested in legislative horsetrading minutia as he in worldwide apocalypse--but whatever, I still devoured this beast. What Markley's particularly good at is taking today's (or a couple of years' ago, when he wrote it) political / meteorological / economic / sociological situation and, without exaggerating, ramping it all up bit by bit as the years go by until we hit the early 2030s and BLAMMO. The main characters, who sometimes interact but more often are on their own journey, are all well drawn, and I was surprised how emotional I got in parts. Just a big, fat, depressing, propulsive read.
]]> 62039305
Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog.

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelog documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today. From avocado and spice in the West to ass-shattering chili in the East to an entire salad on a slice of meat in Chicago, Loftus, her pets, and her ex eat their way across the country during the strange summer of 2021. It’s a brief window into the year between waves of a plague that the American government has the resources to temper, but not the interest.

So grab a dog, lay out your picnic blanket, and dig into the delicious and inevitable product of centuries of violence, poverty, and ambition, now rolling around at your local 7-Eleven.]]> 301 Jamie Loftus 1250847745 Scott 5 Very funny, endearing, and poignant chronicle of Loftus driving around the country during the pre-vax pandemic eating hot dogs, told with verve, solid reporting, great humor, and the appropriate amount of anti-capitalistic fervor. A wild ride that makes me want to eat hot dogs. With her. ]]> 3.90 2023
author: Jamie Loftus
name: Scott
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
review:
Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus
Very funny, endearing, and poignant chronicle of Loftus driving around the country during the pre-vax pandemic eating hot dogs, told with verve, solid reporting, great humor, and the appropriate amount of anti-capitalistic fervor. A wild ride that makes me want to eat hot dogs. With her.
]]> 63028672 I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But��shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny��as the cast of characters it centers,��Bellies��is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.]]> 368 Nicola Dinan 1335490884 Scott 5 4.02 2023
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Scott
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves:
review:
Marketing materials give away a plot point that changes many things about a third of the way through Nicola Dinan's moving, big-hearted, and well-observed debut novel, so try not to read about it before reading it. Though also: I inadvertently knew what was coming and still really liked Bellies. This is the story of a crew of uni students in London, though mostly of Tom and Ming, alternating narration duties, who fall in love and have lots of meaningful and meaningless sex and get wasted and grow up and deal with changes and tragedies and moments of incredible self-discovery as they become young adults. Get ready to cry.
]]> 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

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

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

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Scott 5 3.98 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Scott
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:
Bret Easton Ellis is a year younger than me, so when he sets The Shards during the fall of his (or I should I say his protagonist's, who happens to be named Bret Ellis and is working on a novel called Less Than Zero) senior year of high school (1981), it's like yeah, I get the reference. Even though he's at fancy ass school in rich as fuck LA, and I was at a no-rules rural boarding school in Pennsylvania. We both wound up at Bennington though, though I only lasted a year there. Anyway! The Shards is a gory psychological thriller packed with teenage sex, drugs, New Wave, murder, fear, and loathing that probably should have been cut by at least 250 pages but I still found to be totally engrossing. Like it literally infected my dreams. And even though I guessed the ending about halfway through, it still gave me chills. BEE fans should not miss this beast.
]]> 75292634
“A beautiful, compelling memoir . . . Raban’s final work is a gorgeous achievement.�� —Ian McEwan, New York Times best-selling author of Lessons


In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn’t move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center, where he became acquainted with, and struggled to accept, the limitations of his new body—learning again how to walk and climb stairs, attempting to bathe and dress himself, and rethinking how to write and even read.

Woven into these pages is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II. With intimate letters that his parents exchanged at the time, Raban places the budding love of two young people within the tumultuous landscape of the war’s various fronts, from the munition-strewn beaches of Dunkirk to blood-soaked streets of Anzio. Moving between narratives, his and theirs, Raban artfully explores the human capacity to adapt to trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humor that persist despite it. The result is Father and Son, a powerful story of mourning, but also one of resilience.]]> 336 Jonathan Raban 0375422455 Scott 3 3.73 2023
author: Jonathan Raban
name: Scott
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:
I didn't��really get the��point of this memoir, but I did enjoy, or at least respect, chunks of it. Jonathan Raban is an erudite Brit writer who lives in Seattle and, on the eve of his 69th birthday, suffers a stroke that paralyzes half of his body, resulting in a humbling, at times humiliating weeks-long stint in a rehab ward. It's a scary story that anyone getting old (me) and/or who's spent time in a hospital recently for a serious problem (also me) will identify with. Woven into this��narrative, and taking up at least half the pages, is Raban telling us about his father, who fought in World��War II (Raban was born while dad was in battle) and, I don't know, wrote a ton of cringy swoony letters to Raban's mom? Raban quotes these at length. I started skimming, then skipping, as the excerpts got longer. My sense is that he was going to��tie his father's experience and the idealization of love he expressed in the war letters to the realities of the world once he got home and the lack of emotion he expressed��toward��his son. Maybe? And also draw parallels with Raban's own struggles? Raban died before finishing the��book, and a lot of the final��third feels like it was based on notes, so I don't know.����
]]> 101160112 Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet—revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off.

For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms�� power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Extremely Online is the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.]]> 384 Taylor Lorenz 1982146869 Scott 3 3.58 2023
author: Taylor Lorenz
name: Scott
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:
Not her fault, Taylor Lorenz is a fine, clear writer and an able reporter, but this is one off those cases where I thought the book would be about one thing (the sociological and psychological impact��of being Extremely��Online during all phases��of our social media evolution, from Friendster and Blogger through Instagram and YouTube to TikTok) but instead it was much more about another thing I am mostly soooo not interested in (how��people made money from these things). My bad for not doing more research on the content here before diving in! Like even reading the subtitle would have helped!! Sorry!!�� ����
]]> 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Scott 3 3.25 2023
author: Zadie Smith
name: Scott
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2023/11/07
shelves:
review:
Zadie Smith goes the historical fiction route with this epic tale set throughout most of the 19th��century in London, its environs, and the plantations of Jamaica. The centerpiece of the story is trial (based on real life) of a butcher from Wapping (?) who pretends to be the heir of some sort of grand estate, and is put on trial for fraud that lasts for like a year. Most of the main characters are involved in this trial, either as spectators and witnesses, but there's also a TON of backstory (going back generations) and a whole other literary-figures narrative. Smith is a vivid and clever writer, and can be very funny, comedy-of-manners-wise--and brutal in her eviscerations of colonialism, racism, misogyny, and slavery--but though I enjoyed being in the moment with her I often had no idea what we were doing in this particular place, with these particular��people.�� �� �� ��
]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Scott 5 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Scott
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/16
date added: 2023/10/16
shelves:
review:
My intellectual��hero��delivers another banger. The idea for Doppelganger emerged when people started��confusing/inter-changing Klein with Naomi Wolf, which was slightly annoying, even mildly amusing at first and then, when Wolf went full-right-wing��batshit crazy when the pandemic hit, full-on alarming. And in examining her personal experience with this rollercoaster of a doppelganger ride, it dawns on Klein how doppelgangers--and/or the mirror world--can explain so much of the shittiness of the last twenty years or so and, in the field of mental health and colonialism-driven genocide, for decades and centuries. Other areas of inquiry here include "personal brands" and the online world, climate change, systemic racism, anti-vaxxers and other grifters, and artificial intelligence. She ends with��a lengthy, stunningly relevant chapter on Israel and Jewish identity and Palestine. Klein is brilliant, I think, and I love reading her.��
]]> 44469
July 1863. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is invading the North. General Robert E. Lee has made this daring and massive move with seventy thousand men in a determined effort to draw out the Union Army of the Potomac and mortally wound it. His right hand is General James Longstreet, a brooding man who is loyal to Lee but stubbornly argues against his plan. Opposing them is an unknown General George Meade, who has taken command of the Army only two days before what will be perhaps the crucial battle of the Civil War.

In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fight for two conflicting dreams. One dreams of freedom, the other of a way of life. More than rifles and bullets are carried into battle. The soldiers carry memories. Promises. Love. And more than men fall on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty are also the casualties of war.

The Killer Angels is unique, sweeping, unforgettable–a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America’s destiny.]]> 337 Michael Shaara 0679643249 Scott 4 4.34 1974
author: Michael Shaara
name: Scott
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2009/04/15
date added: 2023/10/05
shelves:
review:
The classic (1974) novel of the American Civil War, focusing on the battle of Gettysburg and, even more specifically, the battles of Little Round Top on day one, and Picket's Charge on day two, both lost by the Confederacy. Though it gets a bit too misty-eyed at times about honor and such, the battle scenes are harrowing and extremely well-told, with multiple maps handling much of the exposition. Hard to believe the war went on for almost two more years after the slaughter that occurred on these Pennsylvania fields. Also notable: the first book I've ever read about the era in which Robert E. Lee looks bad, making poor decisions, sending tens of thousands of men recklessly, needlessly to their death. Lots of nifty historical tidbits scattered throughout, as well.
]]> 62952130
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.]]> 272 Lauren Groff 0593418395 Scott 5 3.73 2016
author: Lauren Groff
name: Scott
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/29
date added: 2023/09/29
shelves:
review:
She's such a genius, Lauren Goff, probably��the smartest fiction writer I read regularly��(by which��I mean��I've read all her books), and her new historical novel The Vaster Wilds does nothing to dissuade me from this correct opinion. Set in like Virginia/Maryland in the 1600s (?), when��English colonists arrived��and starved and died of disease, right before their great��rampage of destruction and genocide across the region, this is story of Lamentations, or Zed, or "girl," (she has multiple names) a servant brought over on a truly horrific and miserable trip across the Atlantic, and, after witnessing an even more horrific situation at the fort in I guess Jamestown, escapes into the vast wilderness. Where things are also horrific! And definitely freezing, freezing cold. It's a gripping adventure that teeters into misery and starvation porn, but there also a lot of competence porn (the girl is extremely resourceful and handy), so that's fun BUT MOSTLY it seems to me, the novel is about the perils of existing as a woman during that or any other time, both specific and general. Also: colonialism sucks so bad. And men. They are terrible. Great book.����
]]> 55276620
We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.]]> 410 Imani Perry 0062977407 Scott 4 3.96 2022
author: Imani Perry
name: Scott
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/21
date added: 2023/09/21
shelves:
review:
An amazing, insightful character study��I guess you'd call it of the American South from the brilliant Imani Perry: lots of history, some memoir, a bit of travelogue, lit crit, sociology (?), poetry. Perry covers each state in a chapter, and ends up on the Islands (Bahamas, Cuba), which she makes a convincing case are part of the Southern story. Perry's from Alabama, or her people are--to be honest I couldn't keep track of everything--and of course she talks mostly about race, and slavery, colonialism, genocide, because you can't talk about or understand any part of America with any honestly or depth without talking about all that. I've never traveled down South, and probably never will, but she did tempt me a bit...��
]]> 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Scott 4 4.06 2023
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Scott
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/08
date added: 2023/09/08
shelves:
review:
Firmly in the young-woman-going-through-shit genre, told with real heart and humor, Caroline O'Donoghue's novel is set in Cork just as Ireland is going through the great recession of 2008+. The protagonist is Rachel, the "incident," involves a beloved professor (though it's not what you think), the gay best friend is James, the boyfriend is also James, there's plenty of sex and drinking and books and being broke and uncertainty about the future and it's all pretty low stakes (except for the people in it at that moment, of course), but O'Donoghue's a terrific writer and the pages fly by.
]]> 121561903
�� The Country of the Blind is about seeing—but also about marriage and family and the moral and emotional challenge of accommodating the parts of ourselves that scare us. A warm, profound, and unforgettable meditation on how we adjust to new ways of being in the world.�� —Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves

We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left.

Full of apprehension but also dogged curiosity, Leland embarks on a sweeping exploration of the state of being that awaits not only the physical experience of blindness but also its language, politics, and customs. He negotiates his changing relationships with his wife and son, and with his own sense of self, as he moves from his mainstream, “typical�� life to one with a disability. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland’s determination not to merely survive this transition but to grow from it—to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening.

Thought-provoking and brimming with warmth and humor, The Country of the Blind is a deeply personal and intellectually exhilarating tour of a way of being that most of us have never paused to consider—and from which we have much to learn.]]> 368 Andrew Leland 1984881426 Scott 4 4.10 2023
author: Andrew Leland
name: Scott
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/25
date added: 2023/08/25
shelves:
review:
Literary- and academia-world insider Andrew Leland--he's taught at Smith��and UMass, he's an editor at The Believer, he's a podcaster and writer (New Yorker, McSweeney's), he's Neil Simon's grandson--gives us this open��and incisive��memoir and what it feels like to lose his sight over a period of many years due a congenital��disease called��retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, combined with a well-researched��and -reported exploration of blind (and disability in general) culture and science today and throughout��history. Leland's an appealing guide to the big picture stuff, some of which slides into gonzo journalism territory, and he brings a lot of intensely personal and specific experiences to the story as well, with his wife and young son, friends, acquaintances, and strangers.��
]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Scott 5 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Scott
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/17
date added: 2023/08/17
shelves:
review:
Ann Patchett is the best, and her new novel Tom Lake is one of my favorite novels of the last few years. So much heart, so much love. And the way Patchett portrays the three daughters, all in their 20s, all back home together for the first time in a while because we're in the quarantine phase of the pandemic, and the family cherry farm in Michigan on which they grew up needs hands? So well done. And our narrator Lara, telling her kids about her weeks at a summer stock theater when she was in her 20s--basically camp, but with sex and booze--and fell in love with a guy who would go on to become a huge movie star? So great. And the *other* love story? Also great. I laughed, I cried, I craved cherries.
]]> 62039222 The devolution of the Sullivan Institute, from psychoanalytic organization to insular, radical cult.



In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill became available and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from societal norms, and the revolution needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family--and monogamous marriage--would free kids from the repressive forces of their parents. The movement attracted many brilliant people as patients, including the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other artists, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. By the 1960s, it had become an urban commune of hundreds of people, with patients living with other patients, leading a creative, polyamorous life.

By the mid-1970s, under the leadership of its cofounder Saul Newton, it devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients' lives, from where they lived to how often they saw their children. Although the group was highly secretive, even after its dissolution in 1991, Alexander Stille has reconstructed the inner life of this hidden parallel world. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia in the heart of New York City.]]> 432 Alexander Stille 0374600392 Scott 5 3.45 2023
author: Alexander Stille
name: Scott
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2023/08/09
shelves:
review:
So crazy, this story. SO CRAZY. I guess I should have known about the Sullivanians, aka the Fourth��Wall, before; there have been articles in outlets that I read all the time (Village Voice, Curbed, Gothamist), but I guess I never dove into them, beyond the lurid-sounding "sex-cult on the UWS" headlines. So I didn't really know anything going into Alexander Stille's wild, exhaustively reported, epic (spanning decades, with a large cast of characters) account of this urban-therapy-commune-turned-brutal-rapey-cult (and theater group) and, whoa. So crazy! And super sad. And so much bigger than I imagined from the headlines, like 240 members at the peak. AND they all lived in my neighborhood at the time, like literally a few blocks away, so I saw these people on the streets and in stores all the time! Wild stuff. Also that Sarah Lawrence cult docu-series dude? That asshole stole all his mind-control ideas from the Sullivanians. Anyway, a gripping read that doesn't get lost in its details.�� �� ��
]]> 54626223 From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…�� To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the “Waldorf of Harlem”—and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.]]> 318 Colson Whitehead 0385545134 Scott 5 3.67 2021
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Scott
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/26
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:
I've read and loved pretty much all of Colson Whitehead books so I'm not sure why I spaced this one a couple of years ago BUT I'm here to tell you now that it's awesome, a rip-roaring read that's part caper, part hard-boiled crime thriller, and all vivid, affectionate portrait of Harlem (warts and all) from 1959 to 1964, when change was most definitely in the air. Whitehead is a terrific writer with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of deftly-turned phrases, one of which get in the way of the brisk narrative. And what a character our protagonist Ray Carney is! His cousin Freddie and hired-muscle/family-friend Pepper too. Great book, can't wait to read the "sequel," Crook Manifesto.
]]> 60473073 Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.]]> 271 Elliot Page Scott 5 3.72 2023
author: Elliot Page
name: Scott
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2023/07/19
shelves:
review:
Elliot Page's raw, heartbreaking, infuriating, lovely memoir of growing up in Nova Scotia, becoming a movie star, coming out as gay, coming out as trans, is fucking rad. I hope I run into him sometime on the street so I can give him a high five or whatever. Or just a smile. Congrats dude. Page jumps around a lot, chronology wise, usually without warning, but he's a clear, vivid writer, and the story is more about emotion than, like, plotting, so it all works. And he's definitely not afraid of being real. At least not while he was writing the book, and opposed to living it. There are some well known names here, which is kind of fun because you can picture everyone, though most of the Hollywood types are given aliases. And man some of the people suck so hard! Also his family. Anyway! Read this book if you care about people.
]]> 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Scott 5 3.29 2023
author: Emma Cline
name: Scott
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/11
date added: 2023/07/11
shelves:
review:
The beach��read of the year, and an excellent addition to the "young��women going through shit" canon. Emma Cline's debut novel Girls involved the Manson��girls and was terrific. The Guest puts us in a less sensational setting--contemporary Hamptons, mostly the filthy rich parts--but the result is no less compelling or page-turning. The titular guest��here is 22-year-old Alex, whose recklessness and increasingly desperate��and self-destructive behavior send her on a five-day journey of lies through the mansions and private beach clubs out east by the beach. Drugs, sex, theft, kidnapping (basically), exhaustion, swimming, very little food, lots of booze, LOTS of money... it's all here folks. Cline is an excellent writer--her sentences bite and sting--and she's awesome at creating complicated characters in a paragraph or two. Yes, these people are easy targets, but she nails it. A fun, gripping, propulsive read.�� �� �� �� ��
]]> 61358639 How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy�� to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend?

In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.

This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.

Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save�� time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.]]> 400 Jenny Odell 059324270X Scott 4 3.60 2023
author: Jenny Odell
name: Scott
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/06
date added: 2023/07/06
shelves:
review:
Jenny Odell is basically brilliant, and I agree with nearly everything she writes about in Saving Time, a meditative look at how time--like, the way we measure it and think about it and "use" it--is a capitalist, power-hoarding, profit-hungry, punitive construct. I had trouble following some of her abstract ruminations (that's on me though; Odell is a lucid writer, I'm just a less lucid thinker), but the more concrete chapters, on climate for example, really hit home. She also touched upon one of my long-held beliefs about the appeal of the apocalypse, if you're one of the survivors, because previous notions of time (and work, and structure) are FINALLY irrelevant and you can really live, and I'd love to discuss that further if we ever run into each other somewhere...
]]> 62687857 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 724 Abraham Verghese Scott 4 4.42 2023
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Scott
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/20
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves:
review:
Epic, three-generation, 750+-page novel set in southern India during most of the 20th century, centered on a single family who own a lot of land, are generally kind and generous, and who often die of drowning. And other ways! There's a lot of death in The Covenant of Water, but a lot of life, too. And food. And medical procedures; several key characters are doctors. And family secrets, of course. Abraham Verghese is an evocative writer, maybe better at scene-setting than character development, but I was never impatient during all these decades and pages. I was in the mood for a fat, easy read to start the summer, and I got it.
]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Scott 4 4.01 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Scott
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves:
review:
Intelligent, honest, evocative, and yet oddly unaffecting coming of age memoir about grappling with and forging an identity, friendship, sex, fear, the immigrant experience, music, death, and grieving, set mostly at Berkeley during the mid-90s. Hua Hsu, with the benefit of hindsight and a consistent journaling habit during the years in question (and so his recreations of small moments from years ago feel true), offers a nuanced and perceptive self-portrait of the deeply insecure teenager he once was, and how an unexpected best-friendship changed his life, and how a subsequent tragedy nearly destroyed him. But is Hsu's self-examination too clinical? Why didn't this pack the emotional wallop I was expecting? My best friend of 20+ years died when we were in our mid-30s, both of us at that point with kids and jobs and a life separate from each other; I can't imagine what a screaming nightmare it would have been had he died when we were like 19 or 20. I don't really have a point, but this is what I was thinking about while reading the book's final acts.
]]> 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters�� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Scott 4 4.14 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Scott
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves:
review:
I didn't buy most of the key narrative drivers in Ann Napolitano's heart-wrenching novel about four incredibly endearing sisters and the dude who gets tragically entwined in their lives. Like, if this had been a streaming series I never would have made it past the first couple of wildly unrealistic big decisions that push the plot forward. That said, Napolitano is amazing with emotions, and making her reader (me) cry, and you root for everyone even when they're being (unnecessarily) idiotic. The second half, especially, is terrific in that regard. Especially if you like hanging out with strong women who adore each other.�� �� �� ����
]]> 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Scott 4 4.27 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Scott
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2023/05/04
shelves:
review:
Matthew Desmond, whose Evicted focused on the systemic greed and racism (aka capitalism) driving the eviction epidemic in the country, now broadens his outlook and hammers home the (what should be obvious to anyone paying attention) point that poverty in general, in America, is a feature, not a bug. That the system and everyone in it only functions as the "haves" want it to by crushing and exploiting the have-nots, whether that means bankers getting rich off of overdraft fees, or business owners getting rich while paying employees unlivable wages, or consumers demanding cheap goods. America could end poverty tomorrow. We choose not to. This is an angry, well-researched book that also tries to shake us out of our hopelessness with a lot of "we must enact this impossible-seeming change that regular citizens have no power to do."
]]> 62628727 A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for "The Night Owls," the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the "Danny Horst Rule," poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.]]> 309 Curtis Sittenfeld 0399590943 Scott 5 3.60 2023
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Scott
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/25
date added: 2023/04/25
shelves:
review:
A fizzy and fun novel that's exactly what the title says it is by the reliably entertaining Curtis Sittenfeld. The romance here is between Sally, a writer for a Saturday Night Live stand-in called The Night Owls, and Noah Brewster, a huge pop star, ridiculously handsome, who comes on the show as both musical guest and host. The first act is the best part, unfolding day by day during a frantic week of putting on the show, and Sittenfeld effortlessly introduces us to all the key players while simultaneously showing lots of insidery stuff about how an SNL episode comes together. The final two acts, which take place a couple years later, and one of which consists of back and forth emails between Noah and Sally, happen during the early pandemic, and Sittefeld again does a nice job setting the scene exactly as it was back then (especially for rich people) while pushing forward the narrative. Everyone's smart and snappy and likable, even when they're being annoyingly insecure, and the pages fly by. Obviously this will be a movie or an eight-part streaming series someday, and it probably won't be as good.
]]> 62050250
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.

Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in �� where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations �� looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens �� less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another �� and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.]]> 256 Nicole Chung 0063031612 Scott 4 3.98 2023
author: Nicole Chung
name: Scott
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/14
date added: 2023/04/14
shelves:
review:
I loved Nicole Ching's first memoir, All You Can Ever Know, mostly about what it felt like to be an adopted Korean kid in an all-white Oregan town, and the search for her birth parents and family. Now Chung, who can't be more than 35 (edit: I just looked it up, she's 41) has written a *second* memoir, A Living Remedy, mostly about her adopted parents, whom she adored, and what it felt like to have them die. This resonated less with me than her first book (even though I'm not adopted), but the writing is beautiful and the story certainly holds a lot of emotion. I don't know maybe there's too much God involved this time for me.
]]> 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Scott 5 3.79 2023
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Scott
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/06
date added: 2023/04/06
shelves:
review:
Excellent thriller-of-sorts set in New Zealand pitting a billionaire pretending to be a prepper (he's much worse) against a group of lefty guerilla gardeners. Total page-turner, but also filled with intelligent musings and realistic, well-drawn characters. Eleanor Catton can def write. The whole thing reads as a metaphor of the horrors of capitalism/climate change (the ending is a gut punch), but the actual narrative, and people therein, can be appreciated on their own. Read it soon before the world goes down in flames!�� ��
]]> 61105800
In 2016, the fate of Paramount Global—the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire that includes Paramount, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, and Simon & Schuster—hung precariously in the balance. Its founder and head, ninety-three-year-old Sumner M. Redstone, was facing a very public lawsuit brought by a former romantic companion, Manuela Herzer—a lawsuit that placed Sumner’s deteriorating health and questionable judgment under a harsh light.
��
As one of the last in a long line of all-powerful media moguls, Sumner had been a relentlessly demanding boss, and an even more demanding father. When his daughter, Shari, took control of her father’s business, she faced the hostility of boards and management who for years had heard Sumner disparage her. Les Moonves, the popular CEO of CBS, felt particularly threatened and schemed with his allies on the board to strip Shari of power. But while he publicly battled Shari, news began to leak that Moonves had been involved in multiple instances of sexual misconduct, and he began working behind the scenes to try to make the stories disappear.
��
Unscripted is an explosive and unvarnished look at the usually secret inner workings of two public companies, their boards of directors, and a wealthy, dysfunctional family in the throes of seismic changes, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. Through the microcosm of Paramount, whose once victorious business model of cable fees and ticket sales is crumbling under the assault of technological advances, and whose workplace is undergoing radical change in the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and a distaste for the old guard, Stewart and Abrams lay bare the battle for power at any price—and the carnage that ensued.]]> 416 James B. Stewart 1984879421 Scott 3 3.72 2023
author: James B. Stewart
name: Scott
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/06
date added: 2023/04/06
shelves:
review:
All of these people--billionaire Viacom/CBS Sumner Redstone, his children, his top executives, his lawyers (so many lawyers in this book!!!) his parasites--are so horrible, but not in a compelling, hilariously-written like the Succession monsters and douches. More just like in that boring entitled money-obsessed consumerist capitalist way of really rich people and wannabes. They all just suck. Not to say that James Stewart and Rachel Adams aren't good storytellers--their talent in that regard totally saves the book--but especially the first half? Just made me feel gross. At least in the second half, which flips to a chronicle of CBS golden boy Les Moonves's habit of sexually assaulting women, there are a few "heroes" trying to take him down as Me Too took hold. There's also an interesting story lurking underneath the garbage here, of legacy media trying to stay relevant once the internet/streaming hit, but mostly Unscripted it made me grateful that none of these people, or people like them, have anything to do with my life.
]]> 61053829
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 Scott 4 3.57 2023
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Scott
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/06
date added: 2023/04/06
shelves:
review:
I really liked Rebecca Makkai's��previous novel, The Great Believers, especially the parts set in Chicago's Boystown during the early days of AIDS. So much emotion! And, as I said then, Makkai is a propulsive writer, and the pages fly by. Which is also true of the equally gripping I Have Some Questions For��You, and the setting here is right up my alley, a small East Coast/New England boarding school (I went to two different ones, and those 2.5 years still loom large more than four decades later), both during the mid-1990s and present day. The plot is basically cold case/wrong(?)-man-in-prison/true crime, and also in a meta way, as the protagonist, Bodie Kane, is a podcaster who dabbles in same. A fun, clever read.�� �� ��
]]> 61272711 New York Times Bestseller | New York Times 10 Best Books of 2023

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his�� slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.]]> 416 Ilyon Woo 1501191055 Scott 4 ]]> 3.95 2023
author: Ilyon Woo
name: Scott
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/01
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves:
review:
Lively, intimate history/dramatic retelling of Ellen and William Craft's daring escape from their Georgia enslavers in 1848--she posed (and passed) as a white gentleman, bandaged from sickness and injury, needing to go to Philadelphia for "his" ailments; he played the part of her slave. They went by train, ship, and coach and, despite some harrowing moments, it worked! But their adventures were only just beginning... Woo does a great job with the basic narrative (movie rights have almost certainly been sold) and the scene setting in Georgia, Boston, various places in England and Scotland, and provides just enough broad historical context so the big picture snaps into place without bogging the story down with too much detail.

]]> 60415700
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?

A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.]]> 246 Kevin Wilson 0062913506 Scott 4 3.68 2022
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Scott
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves:
review:
Kevin Wilson's previous novel, Nothing to See Here, about two kids who catch on fire whenever they get anxious (they're fine, it's just freaky for everyone involved), was one of my favorite books of whatever year that was, because of the storytelling, the humor, and Wilson's big heart. Now Is Not the Time to Panic, about two misfit teenagers in a small Tennessee town whose boring summer turns into anything but when they create (and plaster the town with) a strange piece of art, is almost as good. Same oddball plotting, same sense humor (though here tinged with more tragedy, and bittersweet-ness), same big heart. Wilson is the sort of author I would have completely binged on in my youth. Maybe I'll do it this summer anyway, even though I'm old.
]]> 59808605 Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel―until it no longer does.

Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.]]> 288 Rachel Aviv 0374600848 Scott 5 4.10 2022
author: Rachel Aviv
name: Scott
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/10
date added: 2023/02/10
shelves:
review:
Rachel Aviv's well-reported and -written examination at what happens when people hit up against the limits of psychiatric help, diagnosis, comfort, medication, explanation. She uses four in-depth case studies--a white guy named Ray who couldn't deal with the failure of his business/life; and Indian woman named Bapu who abandons her (wealthy) family to marry a god; a Black woman named Naomi who jumps off a bridge with her two toddler children to save them from our racist world; and a wealthy white woman named Laura who struggles to get off her meds. These are bookended by Aviv's personal story, which began at the age of six when she checked into a mental illness ward at a hospital diagnosed with anorexia. Aviv is a New Yorker writer, and the portraits read exactly like that. Among the themes: therapy vs pharmaceuticals, the role of external forces and triggers in mental illness, the dangers of a diagnosis sparking a self-defining "career" (something Aviv avoided, but some of her ward-mates did not), the feelings of literally losing, not only your sense of self, but who you even *are.* Heady stuff (heh), explored with compassion and lucidity.
]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Scott 5 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Scott
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/31
date added: 2023/01/31
shelves:
review:
Such a sweet, big-hearted novel about love, friendship, creativity, ambition, identity, and gaming, not necessarily in that order, though plenty of very not-sweet stuff happens: murder, amputation, betrayals, misunderstandings, various other deaths. At the story's core are Sam and Sadie, who meet when they're like 11 in the hospital, and instantly bond (fall in love/become best friends) while playing Mario and the like. They both happen to be brilliant, go to Harvard and MIT, create a hit game of their own, start a company, find success and failure, sex, security, and pain. We say goodbye to them in their late 30s. Gabrielle Zevin's tone is warm and generous throughout, the narrative completely immersive, and the pages fly by. Video/computer/console games almost completely drive the narrative, and are spoken about and played at length, but even noobiest noob will be able to follow along and enjoy the ride (except during the sad parts). �� �� �� �� ��
]]> 2393575 Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced a second civil war. From its ashes, today's political world was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Agnew, Humphrey, McGovern, Daley and Wallace; but Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson, John Lindsay and Jane Fonda. There are glimpses of Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and Bill Clinton--and an unambitious young man named George W. Bush.
Filled with prodigious research, driven by a powerful narrative, Perlstein's account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.]]> 881 Rick Perlstein 0743243021 Scott 5 4.24 2008
author: Rick Perlstein
name: Scott
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/24
date added: 2023/01/24
shelves:
review:
The best book I've ever read about America in the 1960s, written in slightly impressionistic style��but also with plenty of meat. ALSO: so much of what was going on then feels exactly like the sort of horrible nonsense��going on now, but it was published in early 2008, so Perlstein wasn't forcing anything. Packed with glorious details. Epic and enlightening.��Top 10 all time non-fiction for me.
]]> 59577225 416 Jody Rosen 0804141495 Scott 5 3.62 2022
author: Jody Rosen
name: Scott
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/29
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves:
review:
I haven't owned a bike since my brief (6-week?) "move" to Fort Collins, Colorado, in the summer of 1982 and I probably just left it there when I fled in horror. And I've never owned a car in my life. Thank god for bike share! I was like Member #526 when Citi Bike launched in 2013 and have been riding these streets almost every day since then. Pretty sure that was the year of my first Bike Kill too. So much joy. So much convenience. Totally changed my life. Anyway, I loved Jody Rosen's history (political, social, sexual, international, recreational, engineering-al) / personal love letter to the bicycle, Two Wheels Good. So much stuff I didn't know, like about the bike mania that swept the world in the 1890s. And how the massacre at Tiananmen Square was accompanied by a government-enforced crackdown on bicycles and bicycle infrastructure (as tools of rebellion), leading to the disastrous switch to a car-dominated culture. And about the dude whose greed led him to bike across the Yukon in pursuit of gold. Rosen is also very careful to de-romanticize the bicycle as a morally superior green machine, even while allowing his passion to come through. He's also a terrific writer, very vivid and muscular. This is a great book.
]]> 59576076
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents���� neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.]]> 399 Tess Gunty Scott 5 3.50 2022
author: Tess Gunty
name: Scott
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/08
date added: 2022/11/08
shelves:
review:
The Rabbit Hutch, the debut novel by Tess Gunty that got long-listed for the National Book Award, is like the book version of an A24 movie. One of the weirder, grimmer, zero fucks given, borderline-horror ones. It's set in the dying depressing city of Vacca Vale, Indiana and, more specifically, inside a crappy affordable housing project called, you guessed it, the Rabbit Hutch. The center around which all the slightly- or very-off characters rotate is Blandine, nee Tiffany, an ethereal, damaged foster-care kid with a ferocious mind and a knack for falling into bad situations. It's all pretty bleak, except when it's laugh-out-loud funny. Gunty is a great writer, and fills the story with sharp, curveball sentences, dead-on observations, strong character development (both thumbnail and in starring roles), and a nicely deployed overall structure. There are some good rants about the evils of capitalism, and predatory male behaviour, and the laziness of social media, and stuff about Hildegard of Bingen that I couldn't really follow but that's ok, I'm not that smart. Anyway! Very cool book.
]]> 60420459 ��
Steven Heller's memoir is no chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but instead, a coming-of-age tale whereby, with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ��70s in New York City.
��
Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 shows his ambitious journey from the start of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his journey through stints at the New York Review of Sex, Screw, and the New York Free Press, until he became the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at age twenty-three.]]> 224 Steven Heller 1648960561 Scott 4 3.82
author: Steven Heller
name: Scott
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/25
date added: 2022/10/25
shelves:
review:
Renowned��art director (New York Free Press, Screw, NY Times Op Ed, NYTBR), lifelong New Yorker, father of��@newyorknico, husband to design legend Louise Fili, Steven Heller has a lot of stories, a few of which he tells in engaging fashion in the coming-of-age memoir (the book ends when he joins the Times at 23) that also serves as a mini-history of the city's once-vibrant underground��newspaper scene in the 1960s and early��1970s. LOTS of illustrations uh, illustrate Heller's uh, illustration tales, and a loose structure and breezy style add to the pleasure.��
]]> 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture�� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 Scott 2 3.74 2022
author: Celeste Ng
name: Scott
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2022/10/25
date added: 2022/10/25
shelves:
review:
Celeste Ng is an extremely successful novelist with a string of mega-bestsellers and undoubtedly lucrative movie/streaming-series deals, plus a warm and appealing Twitter presence that I enjoy, plus probably other good things. So she's far more accomplished than I'll ever be, and that's awesome, congrats to her. I didn't like her new novel though. Way too much filler. I didn't buy the central Crisis, nor the climactic act of rebellion. Biggest sin: she gets key details about NYC wrong. Don't be specific if you don't really know! The whole concept behind Our Missing Hearts is a great and scary one though, and I totally believe America could (and will?) descend into this sort of racist-driven, greed-driven facism (see post 9/11 racist security state, 2008 Obama bank bailout, pandemic racism and government/rich people abandonment) but I don't think she executed it in a credible or compelling way. Oh well, she's definitely totally fine without my support
]]> 58988399
“Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt.�� —Daniel Engber, The Atlantic

“An instant classic.�� —M. C. Mah, Romper

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LIT HUB & THE MILLIONS

An unsparing, loving account of fatherhood and the surprising, magical, and maddening first five years of a son’s life

“I was not prepared to be a father—this much I knew.��

Keith Gessen was nearing forty and hadn’t given much thought to the idea of being a father. He assumed he would have kids, but couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a parent, or what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents�� energy as he was singularly magical.

Fatherhood is another a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child’s needs. Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated. Overnight, Gessen’s perception of his neighborhood suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies, playgrounds, and schools that span entire blocks. Raffi is enchanting, as well as terrifying, and like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is.

Written over the first five years of Raffi’s life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a dad. Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city? How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history’s darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive? How do you get your kid to play sports? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.]]> 256 Keith Gessen 0593300440 Scott 5 3.86
author: Keith Gessen
name: Scott
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/07
date added: 2022/10/07
shelves:
review:
I had a ton of fun reading this early-fatherhood memoir by Keith Gessen, the Russian half of the Brooklyn literary super-duo (he founded N+1, wrote a novel called Terrible Country) with Emily Gould (also a novelist and a semi-famous early Gawker alum), but I'm not sure how universal it is, unless you, too, raised a kid in NYC, and know and can picture different Brooklyn neighborhoods. I'm also an Emily super-fan, and have been following the life of Raffi via Keith's and her socials since he was born. But Gessen is smart, honest and open, observant, vivid, curious, and occasionally lol funny, so if you think you, too, are predisposed to enjoying Raising Raffi, you probably will.
]]> 59576064
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489128 Scott 5 3.83 2022
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Scott
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/03
date added: 2022/10/03
shelves:
review:
Lots going on in this wonderful debut novel. It's an immigrant story, a coming out story, a coming-of-age story, and a love story. It's a brutal indictment of capitalism, it's funny and sexy sometimes, harrowing and infuriating other times, it's about loneliness and alienation, sexual abuse and predation, finding community, finding yourself, America at the end of aughts, friendship, lust, fear, self-destruction, shame, joy... And Sarah Thankam Mathews nails it all. So moving, too! Made me literally cry on the M train. Our narrator goes unnamed for about half the book but, spoiler, it's Sneha, an early-20s immigrant from India, lives in Wisconsin, works as Change Management consultant, is in the closet to everyone she cares about, and who goes through a *lot* in the few years we follow her, most of it internal, some of it logistical. I loved this book.
]]> 56922687 The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.����

“Any story that starts will also end.�� As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.��

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a suprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.�� When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks�� short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.��

A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.��

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.]]> 320 Ann Patchett 0063092786 Scott 5 4.40 2021
author: Ann Patchett
name: Scott
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/27
date added: 2022/09/27
shelves:
review:
Always my pleasure to spend time with Ann Patchett, and this collection of personal essays, most (all?) of which have been published before but none of which I had ever read, is no exception. The one about her "three fathers," the one about the emotional astonishment of meeting a new friend, the one about Snoopy, the one about flying, the one about book covers, the one about the American Academy of Arts and Letters up in Washington Heights... really? I liked them all. She's smart, engaging,��confident,��curious,��funny��and very much not annoying. We are pretty much the same age, Ann and I, and I may have even danced with her back in the early 1980s when I would crash parties at Sarah Lawrence. We should get some ice cream together the next time you're in NYC!
]]> 7992363
L’essentiel de l’histoire se situe entre 1938 et 1942. Le récit est structuré comme un entonnoir : des chapitres courts relatent différents épisodes en divers lieux et à diverses époques, qui tous convergent vers Prague où s’est déroulé l’attentat. Tous les personnages de ce livre ont réellement existé ou existent encore. L’auteur a rapporté les faits le plus fidèlement possible mais a dû résister à la tentation de romancer. Comment raconter l’Histoire ? Cette question conduit parfois l’auteur à se mettre en scène pour rendre compte de ses conditions d’écriture, de ses recherches, de ses hésitations. La vérité historique se révèle à la fois une obsession névrotique et une quête sans fin.]]> 442 Laurent Binet 2246760011 Scott 5 4.05 2010
author: Laurent Binet
name: Scott
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/12
date added: 2022/09/12
shelves:
review:
What a great book. Someone recently tweeted about this decade-old novel, which I had never heard of but totally loved and devoured, proving that Twitter is, in fact, good. HHhH tells the story of an assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most purely evil of all the high-ranking Nazis in WWII (which, obviously, is saying a lot), by a pair of Czech and Slovak resistance fighters / parachutists, and it's a true story that I had never heard and it's horrifying and amazing. But it's also not just a straight re-telling; author Lawrence Binet inserts himself into the novel--or, at least, inserts a narrator who plays the role of the author of the book you're reading--frequently breaking away from the "action" for a sidebar on the challenges (artistic/ethical/narrative) of writing fiction starring actual people involved in events that actually happened. Chapters range in length from a single sentence to maybe five pages long, and it all just flies by. Really glad I saw that tweet!
]]> 59575939 A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.]]> 464 Ed Yong Scott 4 4.46 2022
author: Ed Yong
name: Scott
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/31
date added: 2022/08/31
shelves:
review:
The always-appealing Ed Yong writes with concision on an enormous, still-little-understood topic, the vastly different ways all different species experience the world. Every living creature lives in its own sensory��bubble, or umwelt, some of which are similar to how humans experience things (there are variations within species, too, of course), some which are so extraordinary that it's almost literally impossible to imagine, or even describe, what it must be like. There are obvious things like sound frequencies (bats are the loudest creatures on earth, with a decibel level that rivals jet-engines; fortunately, only they can hear it), light frequencies (flies see things in slow motion compared to us, which is why it's best to move slowly when you go to swat them, because you look stationary), and aroma sensitivity. Even freakier are the vastly different ways animals use touch, echoes, electricity, magnetism, and pain. Interesting science, told with clarity��and charm.��
]]> 59336344
“Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.

When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether.

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.]]> 368 Antonia Angress Scott 4 3.91 2022
author: Antonia Angress
name: Scott
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/10
date added: 2022/08/10
shelves:
review:
Really enjoyed most of Antonia Angress's debut novel, set in an art school (Wrynn College of Art, which is *not* a thinly-veiled Bennington, but I don't which other Northeast one it's supposed to be), and Occupy-era NYC (roughly 2011 to 2013), and starring four main characters but especially Louisa (shy, wide-eyed, from Louisiana) and Karina (jaded, rich, from the city) who meet as as wary roommates and wind up with a deep, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire"-esque emotional and physical (and similarly doomed?) relationship. This romance is the best part, though Angress is also good at sleazeball art world characters, and art trends, and asshole men, and both primary locations, so even though she doesn't quite stick the ending, this is still a lot of fun. 4.5 stars.
]]> 59148726 From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.]]> 368 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548516 Scott 5 4.00 2022
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Scott
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/02
date added: 2022/08/02
shelves:
review:
I really loved Patrick Radden Keefe's last two books, Empire of Pain about the Sacklers, and Say Nothing about the IRA, and so was stoked for Rogues, a collection of a dozen of his New Yorker pieces on, as the subtitle says, "grifters, killers, rebels and crooks," none of which I had read and all of which stand up even after, like, 15 or so years. These are great if you like this sort of meaty, muscular stuff every once in a while, with personal favorites including the Steve Cohen financial scam one, the El Chapo one, the Swiss bank one, and the Anthony Bourdoin one. But really, there's not a clunker in the bunch. It's also just sort of amazing to imagine being these people. Like who becomes an international arms dealer? Or even, like, a fixer? So weird, people's lives. Anyway, if you're at all inclined, you will not be disappointed.
]]> 59089926 A profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world, from one of America's most original voices--the irresistible story of one teenager's reckoning with society at large and her search for a personal utopia.

Bran's Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her "common-law stepfather" on Bourdon Farms--a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family.

And then she meets Peter, a beautiful, troubled, and charming train wreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings--attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots.

Exceedingly rich, ecstatically dark, and delivered with masterful humor, Avalon is a poignant portrait of a young woman who, against all odds, is determined to find her place in the world and find clarity in its remote corners.
]]> 224 Nell Zink 0593534891 Scott 4 3.13 2022
author: Nell Zink
name: Scott
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/25
date added: 2022/07/25
shelves:
review:
A quickie from Nell Zink, whose previous novel, the much more epic Doxology, was one of my favorites of 2020. Still good though! Although it feels like every��novel I read these days has some sort of literary- philosophical- intellectual-criticism angle to it. Anyway, Avalon tells of teenager Bran, who has an unenviable homelife--she's basically enslaved by her "common-law stepfather" and his biker-gang brothers to work��at the family nursery in SoCal--and a massive crush on a entirely too self-aware East Coast kid who winds up abandoning the West Coast for Harvard. Honestly? I can't really remember what happens��(I finished this a couple of weeks ago) but I definitely rooted for Bran, and enjoyed Zink observations��and set pieces.�� �� ��
]]> 58988406 A wistful look back at family, youth, and the intoxicating magic of New England summers, as well as a rumination on friendship and loss, by an esteemed writer and essayist and the former editor of The New York Times Book Review


We all have vivid memories of summers past and the bright skin of youth: of those first days when school has ended; of long days of leisure and pleasure reading dog-eared paperbacks; of camps or cottages or vacation spots we returned to every year; of family road trips and their attendant stresses; of our sexual awakenings and longings; of first dates and becoming lovestruck; of fireworks and lawn games; of penny candies and thunderstorms and drive-in movie theaters; of bracing swims and inevitable sunburns; of outdoor showers and sandy feet; and, who can forget, of timeless friendships forged.

In The Summer Friend, Charles McGrath looks back at his younger days and the pleasures of summer with affection and longing, recalling with a gimlet eye experiences familiar to so many of us. But he also looks back with a clarity that suggests many of our memories may have become idealized over time. More than a tribute to seasons past, Summer is also a poignant story about friendship, about two men from different backgrounds who come together late in life, bonding over shared experiences, experiences born in the saddle of summer and beyond, and with children afoot. Later, when his friend is stricken with cancer, their relationship is imbued with new measure and meaning.

A paean to family, friendship and youth.]]> 240 Charles McGrath 0593321154 Scott 4
It's pretty easy for me to identify with these sections. I've always been a huge fan of the season--it's by far the best time of year--and am enormously grateful to have have several different annual retreats throughout my life, including various locations in Vermont, an amazing lake in New Hampshire, as well as a couple beach towns, from��Martha's��Vineyard as a youth to Montauk in the 1990s and early aughts. I even (especially?) love summer in the city. All the great loves of my life started in the summer, and both my daughters were born during the season, and I've been fortunate enough to share a couple of these summer places/traditions with them.��

McGrath's chapters on boating and golfing, two activities which have not figured in my life but take up an enormous amount of space in his, were less convincing. Weirdly, too, Chip's unexpected friendship with a guy he meets in 30s also named Chip (both of their sons are named Ben), resonated less than I expected, though I did get choked up when he died (not a spoiler). Maybe I just didn't like Chip as much as Chip did? Idk but either way, hell yeah summer, time to get back to it.����]]> 3.75
author: Charles McGrath
name: Scott
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/11
date added: 2022/07/11
shelves:
review:
A brief, gentle memoir, centered on a lifetime��of��summer houses and vacations and a best friend author Chio McGrath met, as an adult, along the way, by a former NYTBR editor (among other powerful��media positions) who vibes WASP but in fact really isn't at all. I really enjoyed a lot of this book, especially when McGrath riffs on what summer feels like, the unforced nostalgia of it all, its��recurring simple pleasures over so many years, and how it all seems to blend into a single time period even as it spans a lifetime.�� ����

It's pretty easy for me to identify with these sections. I've always been a huge fan of the season--it's by far the best time of year--and am enormously grateful to have have several different annual retreats throughout my life, including various locations in Vermont, an amazing lake in New Hampshire, as well as a couple beach towns, from��Martha's��Vineyard as a youth to Montauk in the 1990s and early aughts. I even (especially?) love summer in the city. All the great loves of my life started in the summer, and both my daughters were born during the season, and I've been fortunate enough to share a couple of these summer places/traditions with them.��

McGrath's chapters on boating and golfing, two activities which have not figured in my life but take up an enormous amount of space in his, were less convincing. Weirdly, too, Chip's unexpected friendship with a guy he meets in 30s also named Chip (both of their sons are named Ben), resonated less than I expected, though I did get choked up when he died (not a spoiler). Maybe I just didn't like Chip as much as Chip did? Idk but either way, hell yeah summer, time to get back to it.����
]]> 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Scott 4 3.77 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Scott
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/06
date added: 2022/07/06
shelves:
review:
I like to go into books as cold as possible, so I didn't really get what was going on here until the third (of four) part (the clever structure is revealed in the jacket copy, which I didn't really read before I bought it), but also Hernan Diaz's novel, set mostly in the 1920s in NYC and Switzerland (but really, mostly in the heads of these characters) doesn't need a big reveal to be entertaining. Basically it's the story of a repulsive, narcissistic financier, born filthy rich but who really makes his fortune through speculation in the '20s; his culturally-refined wife, whose arc travels in three different directions in these pages; and the daughter of an immigrant Italian anarchist from Carroll Gardens who gets dragged into their secrets and lives when she's hired to ghostwrite the banker's memoir. Overall: Fun stuff!
]]> 58772764 An extended meditation on late style and last works from one of our greatest living critics (Kathryn Schulz, New York).

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who've mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner's paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane's cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg's defeats, and Beethoven's final quartets--and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over.

Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer's book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty--and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his "hilarious tics" and by Tom Bissell as "perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today," Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federeris a summation of Dyer's passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.]]> 304 Geoff Dyer 0374605564 Scott 3
That said, I did like hearing his thoughts on how *he's* dealing with being in his 60s (I turned 59 in April, and had a literal heart attack soon after), as well people such as Bob Dylan and, yes, the titular tennis player, about whom he actually spends very little time talking about. Also his riffs on Burning Man and the difficulty of knowing which time should be the last time he goes (same with doing DMT and other drugs), the weird phenomenon of feeling happy when a concert / reading / social event is *over,* and you can go home and think with satisfaction "ok I did it" even if you've enjoyed being there, and his rejection of judging a life on how it played out in chronological order, like when people make fun of Boris Becker because I guess he's old and overweight and broke now even though the guy won six grand slam titles in his youth, which is lot more titles than I (and most everyone else on the planet) ever won.��

So I don't��know. He's entertaining but tedious, smart but occasionally smug, open- and broad-minded but also a bit chauvinistic. Up to you.��]]> 3.16 2022
author: Geoff Dyer
name: Scott
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/24
date added: 2022/06/24
shelves:
review:
I guess I've never��read Geoff Dyer before (seems unlikely but I can't find any evidence on the internet that I've done so...) so am unsure if he *always* spends so much time talking about dudes like Beethoven, Nietzsche, Larkin, Turner, and Longfellow but oh man did my thoughts wander during these parts, of which there are many, in��The Last Days of Roger Federer, which consists of a long series of ruminations on the concepts of final works, careers ends, and dying days of, mostly, artists, writers, musicians, and athletes.�� ����

That said, I did like hearing his thoughts on how *he's* dealing with being in his 60s (I turned 59 in April, and had a literal heart attack soon after), as well people such as Bob Dylan and, yes, the titular tennis player, about whom he actually spends very little time talking about. Also his riffs on Burning Man and the difficulty of knowing which time should be the last time he goes (same with doing DMT and other drugs), the weird phenomenon of feeling happy when a concert / reading / social event is *over,* and you can go home and think with satisfaction "ok I did it" even if you've enjoyed being there, and his rejection of judging a life on how it played out in chronological order, like when people make fun of Boris Becker because I guess he's old and overweight and broke now even though the guy won six grand slam titles in his youth, which is lot more titles than I (and most everyone else on the planet) ever won.��

So I don't��know. He's entertaining but tedious, smart but occasionally smug, open- and broad-minded but also a bit chauvinistic. Up to you.��
]]> 58890783 From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 368 Elif Batuman 0525557598 Scott 5 4.00 2022
author: Elif Batuman
name: Scott
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/16
date added: 2022/06/16
shelves:
review:
The very smart and funny Elif Batuman gives us a sequel to her very smart and funny novel The Idiot--like Either/Or feels like an actual "season two;" our hero Selin is now in her second year at Harvard, and there are many recurring characters--and I definitely laughed out loud more often reading this than any book in recent memory. As in The Idiot, much of "action" at Harvard is internal, and involves Selin's random and offbeat observations and takes on mundane conversations and activities. She also digresses into literary analysis and philosophy (the novel's title is from a Kierkegaard book of the same name), but since Batuman is much smarter than me I enjoyed these passages less, though I liked her jokey��meta riff on novels and writers who people say are "good on a sentence level." And then she goes to, not Hungary this time, but Turkey! To write copy for a "hip" travel guide (this all takes place in the pre-smartphone era btw) and see her family. My favorite parts during this final quarter of the book involved Batuman having Selin make obviously poor decisions involving loser men, but realizing that��they're terrible even as she's making them because so what?? isn't she, a young woman, allowed to live a little, and experience stuff, and learn from her mistakes?? Yes she is.����
]]> 53317339
The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable.

He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim.

Nor will he be his last.

The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ��80s and ��90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten.

This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him. And at the same time, it paints a portrait of his victims and a vibrant community navigating threat and resilience.]]> 258 Elon Green 1250224357 Scott 3 3.82 2021
author: Elon Green
name: Scott
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/06/01
shelves:
review:
So every once in a while I get swayed but some well-written, enthusiastic��"Best of" list from someone I respect��on the internet and dive into a genre I don't normally read anymore (I was briefly the "killer thriller/horror/true-crime guy" when I worked at BOMC so so so many years ago). Such was the case with Last Call, Elon Green's look at a serial killer who brought home and chopped up older gay men after the tonier bars closed in Manhattan in the 1990s. The bodies were found in multiple garbage bags left in out-of-the-way rest stops along the highways in the tri-state area. I actually finished this a week ago and can't��remember the details, nor do I remember the crimes being reported at the time (a point Green makes well, how no one cared about gay men dying). But I did appreciate Green's respectful portrait of Manhattan's multiple gay bar scenes in the 70s/80s/90s, including a piano bar-ish cruising loop in the 50s in Midtown East, where I think two of the murdered men were last seen alive. Green admirably spends more time with the victims than the killer but, unfortunately, and not to be rude, their lives aren't that interesting to read about? The killer is creepy as hell though, a highly-regarded nurse at one of the major NYC hospitals who may well have murdered men all over the country (he took "vacations" where he just drove around and stayed for a night or two in random small and mid-sized cities). Anyway.��It was sort of compelling, the book.����
]]> 54976986 An alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780525656975 can be found here.

Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.]]> 608 Maggie Shipstead Scott 5 4.06 2021
author: Maggie Shipstead
name: Scott
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/19
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves:
review:
One of my most frequent, and too often unfilled, book-reading cravings is for a big, fat, epic novel with people you love spending time with, and root for, and follow for basically their entire life and oh man does Maggie Shipstead deliver with Great Circle, just a fantastic story about Marian Graves, who we first meet as an infant in the 19teens��and watch as she becomes, among other things, a first-class aviator, not that women were appreciated for such things. Shipstead gets deep into Graves's life and times and psyche, as she does with all her other characters, including Marian's twin brother Jamie (who has a different path), her childhood/lifelong friend/great love Caleb (a mountain man sort of guy; much of the novel takes place in Montana), and, crucially, to inject some contemporary vibes into the mix, Hadley Baxter, a self-destructive present-day movie star set to play Graves in an upcoming film. There's also a welcome queer theme, an exceptionally vivid lesson on what it feels like to fly a plane, settings around the planet (including Antartica (cold!) and wartime London (freeing!)), terrible tragedy, scrappy triumph, lots of sex, some drugs (Baxter's tripping on mushrooms scene is really well done), broken families, a bit og laughter, the works. Shipstead never coasts--she throws in trenchant observations, unrelated to plot momentum, throughout--and the end gave me literal goosebumps. Loved it all.��
]]> 58085251
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists�� living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians, and—of course—indexers along the way. Duncan reveals the vast role of the index in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, and he shows that in the Age of Search we are all index-rakers at heart.]]> 352 Dennis Duncan 1324002549 Scott 3 3.64 2021
author: Dennis Duncan
name: Scott
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/28
date added: 2022/04/28
shelves:
review:
There are definitely some interesting things getting pored over by Dennis Duncan in his admirably exhaustive history of one of those things most of us take for granted, or literally never, ever think about, the index. Like how in the beginning it took decades (centuries?) of trial and error before people realized that organizing an index in alphabetical order was the way to go (the whole concept of alphabetical order is pretty revolutionary tbh; like everyone just agreed that, yes, this extremely arbitrary sequence is how we all should do it forever). And the fact that the whole hashtag-as-organizing-mechanism was proposed by some rando(ish) dude in a tweet, and the whole world took it to heart. And the fact that people being��worried about new technology making us dumber extends all the way back to Socrates complaining that reading something aloud, instead of speaking from memory, was cheating. Stuff like that is fun, but the bulk of Index is devoted to play-by-play rehashings of thankfully long-forgotten literary and political feuds from god knows when, which to me read as if someone in the year 3267 was retelling, in detail, some inane Twitter discourse dispute from this year. ��
]]> 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Scott 5 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Scott
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/22
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:
Loved this time-traveling adventure by Emily St John Mandel, with action in four (maybe five?) different time periods, lots of lovely scene-setting, some good stoner "what is reality" metaphysics, an apocalypse or two (and an incisive rumination on the appeal of apocalyptic stories), space colonies, and one nice oooooooh aha! moment. It takes place in the same universe, along the same continuum, as her previous two novels, the great Station and The Glass Hotel, which is pretty cool, too. Well-paced, clever, fun to read, immersive, poignant, a joy.�� ����
]]> 58082714 The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.]]> 370 Chuck Klosterman 0735217955 Scott 5 3.86 2022
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: Scott
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/08
date added: 2022/04/08
shelves:
review:
I feel like I must��have��read at least one of Chuck Klosterman's essay collections before--I've definitely��owned two or more at some point--but I can't find any evidence online, so who knows? Anyway, I loved his latest look at American culture/politics/technology/attitude, The Nineties, which was kind of a lost decade for me (lots of partying and then lots of infant/toddler daughter-raising) but clearly Klosterman, with incisive wit, astute observations, and just the right��amount��of glibness to keep this decade-long survey only a shade over 300 pages, has got me covered. Topics include: Nirvana, Ross Perot (the guy got 19% of the popular vote I don't remember that at all), Titanic and Leo, a crazy story Coke's "kamikaze" reaction to Crystal Pepsi, Seinfeld, the internet, Slacker, apathy, irony, OJ the murderer, selling out, the astounding evolution of the telephone, on and on. A great ride.�� �� ��
]]> 57109107 The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.]]> 576 Amor Towles 0735222355 Scott 3 4.18 2021
author: Amor Towles
name: Scott
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/08
date added: 2022/04/08
shelves:
review:
I guess I didn't realize how, like, forced-folksy and corny Amor Towles could be before I started The Lincoln Highway (was Gentleman in Moscow like that?), and the tone got tiresome really quickly, but he's a good enough storyteller that I stuck with the 500+ pages of adventures of these four young 1950s boys/men (two poor farmer kids from the Midwest, one rich kid from New England, one kid from I don't remember where) as they keep trying and failing to get from one place to another. I don't know. Definitely propulsive, but also definitely annoying.
]]> 50743767
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter "the real world". She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.]]> 352 Suleika Jaouad 0399588582 Scott 4 4.40 2021
author: Suleika Jaouad
name: Scott
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/11
date added: 2022/03/11
shelves:
review:
Suleika Jauoad's memoir of cancer and recovery, specifically from a rare form of leukemia that ripped through her body right after graduation from Yale and the start of a life that, for her, meant moving to Paris with a new boyfriend Will. Cancer sucks, that's for sure, but in addition to all of the physical horrors and indignities (and death), there's also the psychic break the sick are forced to take from the "real world"--the book's title comes from Susan Sontag's famous metaphor--an especially painful disruption for someone as young and filled with dreams as Jauoad was when she received her grim diagnosis/prognosis. It's a harrowing story, filled with medical and emotional twists and turns, and as the title implies, even after she went into remission, the fear, sorrow (you lose a lot of friends when your crew is all cancer patients), anger, sense of dislocation, etc., threw her into a different kind of crisis, which she tackled in an Eat Pray Love sort of way. None of this is new territory for a memorist, obviously, but Jaouad is an engaging writer and an appealing person, and Between Two Kingdoms is an intelligent page turner.
]]> 54173267 With the verve and bite of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the whip-smart, wisecracking sensibility of a golden-age Hollywood heroine, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City.

Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.

In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.

Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.]]> 280 Marlowe Granados 1989919006 Scott 4 3.46 2020
author: Marlowe Granados
name: Scott
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/04
date added: 2022/03/04
shelves:
review:
Marlowe Granados' under-200-pages novel about a pair of early-20s women, Isa and Gala, who spend a summer in NYC sharing a room in a shitty sweaty apartment with no real job or money but definitely a large appetite��for going out��eating and drinking and having fun. This is a quick, lively read with enough sharp observations about human interactions and insight into what it feels like to be young--the pain, the possibility, the invincibility, the fear, the know-it-all-when-you-acually-know-nothing attitude, the hedonism and horniness--to give it some heft. Reviewers/marketers call it a "party girl" novel and I guess that's accurate because they sure do party a lot thanks to a never-ending parade of willing rich dudes, but I mean who didn't party a lot in their early 20s? Also I think it undersells the novel's intelligence. Granados totally nails the city too, which is always a pleasure.����
]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 Scott 4 4.20 2021
author: David Graeber
name: Scott
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/14
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves:
review:
A kind of intellectual��and political history, I guess, taking as its launching point the ol' Hobbes to Rousseau evolution��of humanity (nasty and brutish until the invention of agriculture which allowed for civilization) which, paradoxically, has only imprisoned us, and, over the course of 500+ pages, reams of anthropological and archaeological research, and many thousands of years all over the planet, shows that, nope, humans have always been capable of deciding how to organize their societies since forever, and so there's nothing inevitable about any of it. Also that maybe Amerindian intellectuals were the real architects of the European Enlightenment? Graeber and Wengrow (the latter died before publication) are engaging writers, so it never gets too dry or academic (there's almost no jargon, and when it's deployed, it's done with an apology), and it's fun to imagine how all of these people lived throughout history and prehistory in so many different settings around the world. Made me want to read 1491! I guess the point is that there's really no reason why great cities/states can't function just fine under anarchy, which, since every other organizing principle is failing us all now, I personally��think is the way to go. I think that's the point. Anyway, it's *my* point.��
]]> 52741293 Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.

Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs.

Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.

A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.]]> 430 Douglas Stuart 0802148042 Scott 4 4.29 2020
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Scott
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/16
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves:
review:
This is one of those completely unfair "I wish this had been a different book" sort of reviews, but whatever. Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker last year, is a beautifully written (with lots of lyrical Scottish phrasing in the dialogue), wonderfully vivid, and deeply compassionate novel about just a disaster of a family living on the outskirts of Glasgow in the 1980s. The main character, you would think from the title, is Shuggie, the youngest of the three kids, and he does play a large role here and is perhaps the emotional core of the story, BUT we spend way more time with his mom, Agnes, a hopeless alcoholic whose life follows an unsurprising��trajectory if you are also an alcoholic, or have ever loved one, or are familiar with such stories from any number of other books or movies. Don't get me wrong, Douglas Stuart captures Agnes's despair and hope, cruelty and selfishness, moments of peace and vicious self-destruction, all too well. But I would have prefered to hang out more with Shuggie.��
]]> 57812401
Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love.]]> 240 Lily King 0802158765 Scott 5 3.70 2021
author: Lily King
name: Scott
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/30
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves:
review:
Lily King has emerged as one of my favorite authors (I loved both Euphoria and Writers & Lovers), and this collection of punchy short stories was the perfect way to end the year. The characters and settings are all over the place, though many of the ten stories involve single parents with tween-teenage kids, and/or the latter put into a position of babysitting/being babysat, with two notable exceptions, including the surreal but satisfying finale. And though there's often a vague sense of menace hanging over the proceedings, as some outright violence/hostility, King usually allows her big heart and generous spirit to win the day. An excellent bunch of snacks and we await the meal (her next novel).
]]> 52580373 304 Ruth Coker Burks 0802157246 Scott 3 4.47 2020
author: Ruth Coker Burks
name: Scott
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/15
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves:
review:
The memoir of an Arkansas��woman who,��starting in the early��1980s, and with no medical training, dedicated much of her life to helping gay men of Hot Springs dying of AIDS, at a time when no one else--their family, the church, medical professionals--refused to be in the same room as the patients, and often wouldn;t even acknowledge their existence. As time went on, Ruth Corker Burns also became an AIDS and safe sex educator. There are obviously lots of moving��scenes here, and you have to admire her dedication, but, frankly, her self-portrait (with co-author Kevin Carr O'Leary) lays it on a bit thick. LOTS of recreated dialogue here, remembered from years and years ago. She loves portraying herself as an Erin Brockovich sort of character, all big hair and clackety��heels and sassy attitude, and I couldn't help but think the book was written with an eye to selling the movie rights for big money. Too cynical? Quizas.�� ��
]]> 55881796 Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.

A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.]]> 592 Jonathan Franzen 0374181179 Scott 4 4.05 2021
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Scott
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/10
date added: 2021/12/10
shelves:
review:
Another massive novel about a fucked up family, and even though there's waaaaaaay too much talk about God here for my tastes and ability to personaly identify with many of these people's struggles (of which there many), Franzen is as compulsively readable as ever. By which I mean, no matter what's going on here, whether narrative drama or introspective rumination, the 600+ pages fly by. The story is set in the early 1970s in a suburb of Chicago (though key moments take place on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, in a weird squat in Rome, and on a hillside in Peru, and in 1950s LA), and the stars are the Hildebrandt family: dad Russ, a self-pitying pastor horny for a parishioner and at war with the youth pastor; mom Marion, a sad sack with a legit dark past; eldest son Clem, who's an idiot seeking redemption from the Lord (?) or something, and who's arc involves the Vietnam War; only daughter Becky, whose insights into high school popularity are shrewd, and, despite this, is kind of the only likable character; second son Perry, who's amusingly brilliant but also a junkie (Franzen does a great job with the cocaine scenes); and youngest son Judson, who isn't really important here. Franzen is funny and sharp, a vivid scene-setter, a great observer of humans. I sometimes wonder how authors like this do it. Like: is he consciously observant of small behaviors in his friends, family, and strangers, that he then writes down in a little notebook, and scatters throughout his books? Or does he just wing it? Anyway, I took off a star because of boring old God, but Franzen fans (like me) will not be disappointed.
]]> 56913465 The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics' interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the "epic of epics"--and to the past sixty years of American culture--from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale


The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing--nobody's supposed to. So, of course, that's what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown.

And then he made sense of it--seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk's hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day--a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders.

As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it's also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns--the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story's progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it's also a revelation for readers who don't know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.
]]> 367 Douglas Wolk 0735222169 Scott 3 3.98 2021
author: Douglas Wolk
name: Scott
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/19
date added: 2021/11/19
shelves:
review:
First, my credentials. For about three years, call it fourth��through��sixth grade (so, like, the early 1970s) I read, and "collected," tons of Marvel comics: Thor, Avengers, Ghost Rider, Captain America, Spider-Man, Defenders, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Hulk, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, all of the obvious ones. I loved them at the time, but don't remember a single thing about the content. I also really enjoy the movies, and during the pandemic have done three complete rewatches of the entire series. So I feel like I have both an emotional/nostalgic connection to these guys (and they are mostly guys) and a pretty good working knowledge of everything going��in the MCU movies and shows. BUT, THAT SAID, I really had��no idea what was going on throughout much of Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels, for which he read the entire��27,000+-Marvel-comics oeuvre��from 1961 (Fantastic Four #1) until now, read it as a single work of fiction, and then, essentially, retold a lot of the vast, master plot in this book. Even with my basic knowledge I couldn't keep��all these��characters straight, so for many pages I was reading on autopilot. He's a good, clear, breezy writer, so it's not a slog, really. I just couldn't follow the action. I did like the "interlude" chapters during which Wolk would examine a theme or three, and in general it's fun to spend time thinking about Marvel comics, and it IS pretty incredible how interconnected they all are, and throughout the entire history of the decades-long run, and the coda was nice, when he was bonding with his grade-school-age son over these books. But still: for deeply involved readers only, I think.��
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