en-US Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:28:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 31930849
Avec ce deuxième roman empreint d’un flamboyant cynisme, Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard trace un portrait sombre de l'obsession de la performance en mettant en scène le monde des étudiants en droit. À travers eux, il décortique de manière toujours plus incisive l’absurde sentiment de supériorité naturelle des classes dominantes.]]> 288 Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard 2924670039 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.19
author: Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 57734481
Avec ce quatrième roman, Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard continue son exploration des relations de pouvoir et de la compétition qui en découle. À travers une narration tout aussi inventive que dans ses livres précédents, il nous parle d’échec amoureux, de célébrité instantanée, de confiance en soi déficiente et des mouvements de dénonciation d’agressions sexuelles.]]> 360 Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard 2924670977 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 currently-reading 4.05
author: Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 38354435
Si quelqu’un devait la décrire, par exemple un homme gras et chauve croisé sur la rue, il aurait dit quelque chose comme eh ben en partant est vraiment pas grosse, même que j’dirais maigre, cute itou, dans le sens de belle, mais ça dépend pour qui, pis elle a pas l’air vite, fait que globalement : Mitsou dans le temps de « Bye bye mon cowboy ». Si on avait plutôt demandé à son âme-sœur, il aurait dit quelque chose comme elle a de belles grosses lèvres roses qui s’éparpillent et quelque chose de troublant dans ses grands yeux verts, et elle aurait répondu merci c’est beau comment tu me décris et il aurait ajouté ça fait plaisir t’es un record de beauté et là, wo, exagère pas, mais son âme-sœur existe pas, et cette conversation non plus, en tout cas pas encore.

À grands coups d’images qui rentrent dans le cœur et ressortent plus de la tête, �ٲ�����è�Ա� est (entre autres) un roman qui raconte l’émancipation d’une jeune femme perdue dans le gris des entre-deux, prisonnière imaginaire de Montmorency, le quartier oublié de la ville de Québec.]]> 232 Noémie D. Leclerc jules ⭑°⋆ 4 favorites 3.93
author: Noémie D. Leclerc
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> 128029
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a portrait of a wounded country and a story of family and friendship, of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond, and an indestructible love.]]> 372 Khaled Hosseini 1594489505 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2025 4.44 2007
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read, 2025
review:

]]> 26893819 355 Emma Cline 081299860X jules ⭑°⋆ 4 2024-tbr 3.48 2016
author: Emma Cline
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 21570066
Since she was a baby, Maren has had what you might call "an issue" with affection. Anytime someone cares for her too much, she can’t seem to stop herself from eating them. Abandoned by her mother at the age of 16, Maren goes looking for the father she has never known, but finds more than she bargained for along the way.

Faced with love, fellow eaters, and enemies for the first time in her life, Maren realizes she isn’t just looking for her father, she is looking for herself. The real question is, will she like the girl she finds?]]> 304 Camille DeAngelis 1250046505 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2025 3.58 2015
author: Camille DeAngelis
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read, 2025
review:

]]> 58351056 112 Emma Cline jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.19 2020
author: Emma Cline
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1772910 82 Fyodor Dostoevsky jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2025 4.16 1848
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read, 2025
review:

]]> 581811 448 Jacqueline Susann 0802135196 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2025 3.96 1966
author: Jacqueline Susann
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read, 2025
review:

]]> 1151337 600 Isabel Allende jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.29 1982
author: Isabel Allende
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23692271 512 Yuval Noah Harari jules ⭑°⋆ 0 4.33 2011
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 1413637 186 Nelly Arcan 2020557177 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 3.61 2001
author: Nelly Arcan
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: books-i-own-and-will-read, 2024-tbr, currently-reading
review:

]]> 49455 Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.]]> 136 Fyodor Dostoevsky 067973452X jules ⭑°⋆ 5 4.21 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1864
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: books-i-own-and-will-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 383137 Simplified adaptation with language-learning materials.
[Penguin Readers Level 6]

Paul Sheldon is Annie Wilkes' favourite writer. She loves all his books about Misery Chastain. When she finds Paul injured after a car crash and takes him home she learns that he has decided to end the series by killing off Misery. Soon Paul's biggest fan turns into his biggest enemy and his nightmare begins! By the master of horror, Stephen King, this will keep you on the edge of your seat!]]> 96 Robin Waterfield 3526418292 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.50 1987
author: Robin Waterfield
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54475865 Le temps d'un dîner de retrouvailles �� à quatre �� chaque mot, chaque regard, chaque geste est scruté, pesé, interprété. Tout remonte à la surface : les non-dits, les regrets, la course du temps, mais aussi l'espérance et les fantômes du désir.
À leurs risques et périls.]]> 155 Philippe Besson 2266307499 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.03 2019
author: Philippe Besson
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 3.29 2023
author: Emma Cline
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 128726931 Do you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes?


Did you see the pictures of the body?

Did you look for them?

It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.

That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

The only question is: how much of it is true?]]> 434 Eliza Clark jules ⭑°⋆ 0 currently-reading 4.02 2023
author: Eliza Clark
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 123636870
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.��

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 192 Sarah Bernstein 1039009069 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 3.02 2023
author: Sarah Bernstein
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/06/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 286957
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the “horrid�� wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.

A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

Excerpt:
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.]]> 62 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1558611584 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.11 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1892
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/24
date added: 2024/04/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison jules ⭑°⋆ 4 3.96 1987
author: Toni Morrison
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/22
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 58988710
Alain prie pour que le sort les épargne, pour que ce grand jour en soit un de fête et de guérison. Or un nom resurgit au détour d’une phrase, un nom maudit remonté du fond de sa mémoire, là où gisent la honte et la douleur des années sombres, un nom que rejoignent bientôt une voix, un corps, une histoire. Un fantôme se fait chair, qui a plusieurs visages. Et tout ce qu’on a voulu oublier, tout ce qu’on a refusé de voir, tout ce qu’on a détesté vient réclamer son dû.

Comme on fait son lit on se couche. Car la vie, ya Alain, est un piège qui sommeille dans la prison du temps. Oui, la vie, ya ebni, souviens-t’en, ne dure pas : quelques joies, de grandes peines, mille secrets, mille dangers.]]> 512 Alain Farah jules ⭑°⋆ 4 3.98
author: Alain Farah
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 12351695 La famille de Lucile, la nôtre par conséquent, a suscité tout au long de son histoire de nombreux hypothèses et commentaires. Les gens que j’ai croisés au cours de mes recherches parlent de fascination ; je l’ai souvent entendu dire dans mon enfance. Ma famille incarne ce que la joie a de plus bruyant, de plus spectaculaire, l’écho inlassable des morts, et le retentissement du désastre. Aujourd’hui je sais aussi qu’elle illustre, comme tant d’autres familles, le pouvoir de destruction du Verbe, et celui du silence.
Le livre, peut-être, ne serait rien d’autre que ça, le récit de cette quête, contiendrait en lui-même sa propre genèse, ses errances narratives, ses tentatives inachevées. Mais il serait cet élan, de moi vers elle, hésitant et inabouti.]]> 440 Delphine de Vigan 2709635798 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.32 2011
author: Delphine de Vigan
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36476306
Entre le conte de fées enragé et la reprise hallucinée des récits d’apprentissage, entre la forêt de Sainte-Amère-de-Laurentie et la grande ville électrique, La dévoration des fées raconte le sort de la p’tite, de Grand-maman et de Blanche absente. Mais le récit est ravalé par le chant, le mythe, la fantasmagorie, et une poésie féroce et primordiale hante la narration. Œuvre baroque et mal embouchée, La dévoration des fées est traversé de sortilèges crachés ou lyriques, dans une scansion affamée, bourrée jusqu’aux yeux de désir.]]> 144 Catherine Lalonde 2896983260 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 3.41
author: Catherine Lalonde
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.41
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 391724
The tale centers on two matters, a black cat and the deterioration of a man. The man is one who enjoyed family life with his wife and numerous pets, but then he changed radically for the worse. The story is often compared to "The Tell-Tale Heart" because of the profound psychological elements these two works share. "The Black Cat" is a story you will never forget.

Librarian's note: this entry relates to the story "The Black Cat." Collections and other short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on ŷ������.]]> 24 Edgar Allan Poe 1594561753 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 4.07 1843
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1843
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 762390 The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.]]> 96 Clarice Lispector 0811211908 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.11 1977
author: Clarice Lispector
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61324696
We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.

In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.]]> 304 Dizz Tate 1646221672 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 currently-reading 3.16 2023
author: Dizz Tate
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 68783
Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.]]> 169 Susanna Kaysen 0679746048 jules ⭑°⋆ 5 3.95 1993
author: Susanna Kaysen
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 57032001 All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,�� Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.]]> 368 Mona Awad 0735241201 jules ⭑°⋆ 5 Mona Awad just might be a literary genius. This book has me questioning everything]]> 3.78 2021
author: Mona Awad
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/13
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
review:
★★★★ ½
Mona Awad just might be a literary genius. This book has me questioning everything
]]> 50542119 Now a Netflix original movie, this deeply scary and intensely unnerving novel follows a couple in the midst of a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease. You will be scared. But you won’t know why��

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

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

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

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.]]> 256 Iain Reid jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2024-tbr 3.64 2016
author: Iain Reid
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/08
shelves: to-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 18719246
Gaston Miron, Saint-Denys Garneau et Paul Chamberland ont nommé Terre Québec ; Joséphine Bacon élargit le pays en nous initiant à la toundra et aux douces chansons de l’infini. L’horizon est offert avec tant de grâce et de naturel que nous lui sommes à jamais redevables de nous rappeler à l’essentiel : beauté, simplicité et volupté.

Recueil bilingue innu-aimun / français]]> 100 Joséphine Bacon 2897120959 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.15 2013
author: Joséphine Bacon
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 194018 113 Jean-Paul Sartre jules ⭑°⋆ 0 3.76 1946
author: Jean-Paul Sartre
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1946
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/01
date added: 2023/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40691778 128 Thomas Nagel 2841623726 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 3.38 1987
author: Thomas Nagel
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/02
date added: 2023/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 45894065 208 Jean Rhys 0393357805 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.87 1939
author: Jean Rhys
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61111034
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,�� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 588 Mariana Enríquez 0451495144 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.07 2019
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
��
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence �� a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.19 1966
author: Daniel Keyes
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 137219871 358 Emmanuelle Pierrot 2896986332 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.39
author: Emmanuelle Pierrot
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55711559 Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.

Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruel acts of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child—that has haunted her every waking moment—while forging the power to finally strike back.

Here is the electrifying debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Three Women, which was named to more than thirty best-of-the-year lists and hailed as “a dazzling achievement�� (Los Angeles Times) and “a heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece�� (Esquire). Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. With writing that scorches and mesmerizes, Taddeo illustrates one woman’s exhilarating transformation from prey into predator.]]> 336 Lisa Taddeo 1982122129 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.71 2021
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 122773864
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate��when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse , the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its��pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.]]> 372 Mona Awad 0735241244 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.61 2023
author: Mona Awad
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57739876 From the author of the classic A Little Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love �� partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens �� and the pain that ensues when we cannot.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385547935 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.74 2022
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.��Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 2024-tbr, currently-reading 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/04
shelves: 2024-tbr, currently-reading
review:

]]> 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,�� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?�� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!��), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.45 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 54388240
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention��

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 297 Eliza Clark 1910312630 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 american psycho for girls]]> 3.86 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/28
date added: 2023/08/24
shelves:
review:
4.5
american psycho for girls
]]> 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 jules ⭑°⋆ 5 4.17 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/04
date added: 2023/08/24
shelves:
review:
review to come i’m still recovering from the ending
]]> 45730983
Thankfully, Wonder enters the picture. They have so much in common. No college degrees, no pretensions, no stories from prep school or grad school. Just a love for literature. If only Wonder could commit herself to the writing life they could be those rare literary soulmates who never fall prey to their demons. Wonder has a tendency to love, to covet, but Joe is a believer in the rule of fiction: If you want to write a book, you have to kill your darlings.

With her trademark satirical, biting wit, Caroline Kepnes explores why vulnerable people bring out the worst in others as Joe sets out to make this small, exclusive world a fairer place. And if a little crimson runs in the streets of Cambridge . . . who can blame him? Love doesn’t conquer all. Often, it needs a little push.]]> 448 Caroline Kepnes jules ⭑°⋆ 0 currently-reading 3.27 2023
author: Caroline Kepnes
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 976805 224 Oscar Wilde 0879518707 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 “If bitter necessity, or prudence, to me more bitter still, had prevented my being near you, and robbed me of the joy of your presence, though seen through prison-bars and in a shape of shame, I would have written to you in season and out of season in the hope that some mere phrase, some single word, some broken echo even of Love might reach you.”]]> 4.07 1897
author: Oscar Wilde
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1897
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/17
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:
when they say “ily�� but Oscar Wilde wrote
“If bitter necessity, or prudence, to me more bitter still, had prevented my being near you, and robbed me of the joy of your presence, though seen through prison-bars and in a shape of shame, I would have written to you in season and out of season in the hope that some mere phrase, some single word, some broken echo even of Love might reach you.��
]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ��80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 some themes like race or lgbtq+ issues could have been explored in more depth. At times, it felt like they didn’t contribute to the progression of the storyline but rather existed separately and weren’t essential to the plot.
overall, this book was fun and easy to get through and it got me out of a reading slump !!! ]]> 4.39 2017
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/25
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:
a very enjoyable read ! really compelling storytelling .
some themes like race or lgbtq+ issues could have been explored in more depth. At times, it felt like they didn’t contribute to the progression of the storyline but rather existed separately and weren’t essential to the plot.
overall, this book was fun and easy to get through and it got me out of a reading slump !!!
]]> 337113 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman's fight for domestic independence and creative freedom.]]> 576 Anne Brontë 0140434747 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.00 1848
author: Anne Brontë
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1714747 They is a dream, a surreal nightmare which sends a shock right to the heart of our cultural complacency.

As you read it you should remember that the men and women who live and die in it might easily be you. (They could be snatched out of your hand, quite suddenly, and pulped. No reason would be given, except pure destructive savagery.)

Those who struggle in its pages to maintain their reason, their sanity, their capacity to love and hope, are not so far removed (nor are the forces that menace them) from our own and, as we fondly imagine, unruffled lives.

As bureaucracy and governmental control proliferate, Kay Dick pleads for the individual and intellectual freedoms which are so rapidly being eroded. Her book is both a poignant celebration of these values and an anguished caveat.]]> 112 Kay Dick jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.39 1977
author: Kay Dick
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1389044 - Vous m'avez dit l'autre jour, sur le Schlangenberg, que vous étiez prêt, sur un mot de moi, à vous jeter en bas, la tête la première et nous étions bien à mille pieds de haut. Je dirai ce mot un jour, uniquement pour voir si vous vous exécutez et soyez certain que je montrerai du caractère. Je vous hais justement parce que je vous ai permis tellement de choses, et je vous hais encore plus parce que vous m'êtes si nécessaire.»]]> 222 Fyodor Dostoevsky 2070368939 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 3.80 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1866
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/17
shelves: to-read, books-i-own-and-will-read
review:

]]> 387348
Librarian note: An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.

]]> 496 Mary McCarthy 0156372088 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.69 1963
author: Mary McCarthy
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49535227
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?

Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.]]> 288 Megan Nolan jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.71 2021
author: Megan Nolan
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58536037 A young, mixed-race vampire must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger in this stunning debut novel from a writer-to-watch.

Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced-coffee, ice cream and cake, and foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But, Lydia can't eat any of these things. Her body doesn't work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London--where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.

Then there are the humans--the other artists at the studio space, the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men that follow her after dark, and Ben, a boyish, goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them. In her windowless studio, where she paints and studies the work of other artists, binge-watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and videos of people eating food on YouTube and Instagram, Lydia considers her place in the world. She has many of the things humans wish for--perpetual youth, near-invulnerability, immortality--but, she is miserable; she is lonely; and she is hungry--always hungry.

As Lydia develops as a woman and an artist, she will learn that she must reconcile the conflicts within her--between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans if she is to find a way to exist in the world. Before any of this, however, she must eat.]]> 240 Claire Kohda 0063140888 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.46 2022
author: Claire Kohda
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2024-tbr 3.91 2022
author: Antonia Angress
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: to-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 42584178 A sharply intelligent and intimate debut novel about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites--and their physical spaces--that posits the question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?

Roberta spends her life trying not to take up space. At almost thirty, she is adrift and alienated from life. Stuck in a mindless job and reluctant to pursue her passion for food, she suppresses her appetite and recedes to the corners of rooms. But when she meets Stevie, a spirited and effervescent artist, their intense friendship sparks a change in Roberta, a shift in her desire for more. Together, they invent the Supper Club, a transgressive and joyous collective of women who gather to celebrate, rather than admonish, their hungers. They gather after dark and feast until they are sick; they break into private buildings and leave carnage in their wake; they embrace their changing bodies; they stop apologizing. For these women, each extraordinary yet unfulfilled, the club is a way to explore, discover, and push the boundaries of the space they take up in the world. Yet as the club expands, growing both in size and rebellion, Roberta is forced to reconcile herself to the desire and vulnerabilities of the body--and the past she has worked so hard to repress. Devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny, Supper Club is an essential coming-of-age story for our times.]]> 294 Lara Williams 0525539581 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.45 2019
author: Lara Williams
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34066798 The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers—Now a Paramount+ with Showtime series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.]]> 462 Amor Towles jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.28 2016
author: Amor Towles
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9912 From the bestselling author of American Psycho comes this satirical black comedy about the death of romance.

Set at an affluent liberal arts college during the height of the Reagan eighties, The Rules of Attraction follows a handful of rowdy, spoiled, sexually promiscuous students with no plans for the future—or even the present. Three of them—Sean, Paul, and Lauren—become involved in a love triangle of sorts within a sequence of drug runs, "Dressed to Get Screwed" parties, and "End of the World" parties.

As Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at the self-consciously bohemian Camden College, treating their sexual posturing and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion, he exposes the moral vacuum at the center of their lives.]]> 283 Bret Easton Ellis 067978148X jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.74 1987
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 2024-tbr, currently-reading 3.82 1991
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves: 2024-tbr, currently-reading
review:

]]> 122772334 Unknown jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.96
author: Unknown
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.96
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57368551 Mystérieusement libérées de leur geôle, elles entreprennent sur une terre déserte une longue errance à la recherche d’autres humains �� ou d’une explication. Elles ne découvrent que d’autres caves analogues, peuplées de cadavres.
On a pu parler de Kafka, de Paul Auster ou du Désert des Tartares au sujet de cette œuvre à la fois cauchemardesque et sereine, impassible et bouleversante.]]> 191 Jacqueline Harpman 2253140937 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 currently-reading 4.11 1995
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 52028992 364 B.R. Yeager 1733569456 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.71 2020
author: B.R. Yeager
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61686012 “Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.��

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 192 Han Kang 0593595270 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.54 2011
author: Han Kang
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34080 The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is often regarded as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, as well as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.

The work, divided in 5 sections, juxtaposes the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, with a snapshot of early twentieth-century British society. In contemporary times, it is often read published within The Waste Land and Other Poems and has come to be Eliot's most popular poem.

T.S. Elliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Born in 1888 in St. Louis (MO, USA), he is considered one of the 20th century's major poets, and a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry."In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."]]> 288 T.S. Eliot 0393974995 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.11 1922
author: T.S. Eliot
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52597312 The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.

Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.

David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?]]> 574 David Mitchell 0812997433 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.94 2020
author: David Mitchell
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18306732
This edition also includes ‘A Fragment�� by Lord Byron and ‘The Vampyre: A Tale�� by John Polidori, as well as an introduction and notes. Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.]]> 352 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 0141393394 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.07 1818
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1818
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/07
date added: 2023/05/07
shelves:
review:
victor frankenstein and i are the same (constantly falling ill due to anxiety)
]]> 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 jules ⭑°⋆ 5 favorites
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?��

a work of art. absolutely beautiful.]]> 3.94 2013
author: Donna Tartt
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/22
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves: favorites
review:
★★★★��

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?��

a work of art. absolutely beautiful.
]]> 53764148
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.]]> 336 L.P. Hartley jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.20 1953
author: L.P. Hartley
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born �� a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam �� and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 jules ⭑°⋆ 4 4.05 2019
author: Ocean Vuong
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 24800
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.]]> 710 Mark Z. Danielewski jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.11 2000
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50428 382 Albert Camus 2070323021 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.04 1951
author: Albert Camus
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49856101 A thrilling departure: A short, piercing, deeply moving new novel from the acclaimed author of I Am, I Am, I Am, about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in fifteenth-century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play.

England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.]]> 310 Maggie O'Farrell jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.32 2020
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37856897 20 Donna Tartt jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.39 1993
author: Donna Tartt
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1453230 336 Nathalie Sarraute 2070316963 jules ⭑°⋆ 3 3.36 1983
author: Nathalie Sarraute
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/04
date added: 2023/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 4631 192 Ernest Hemingway jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.04 1964
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.�� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,�� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2024-tbr 3.96 1955
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/28
shelves: to-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 jules ⭑°⋆ 3 3.5 i don’t know how to feel 3.94 1970
author: Joan Didion
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/26
date added: 2023/03/26
shelves:
review:
3.5 i don’t know how to feel
]]> 19547499 20 Donna Tartt jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.84 2006
author: Donna Tartt
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 989273
Hazel Eyes connects us to universal emotions, those that may be uncomfortable to explore but better to reveal as a way to sooth the soul.

]]> 32 Donna Tartt 0140252983 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.84 1993
author: Donna Tartt
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52159444 10 Donna Tartt jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.15
author: Donna Tartt
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33786141 194 Philippe Besson 2260029884 jules ⭑°⋆ 5 favorites

« En fin de compte, l'amour n'a été possible que parce qu'il m'a vu non pas tel que j'étais, mais tel que j'allais devenir. »]]> 4.37 2017
author: Philippe Besson
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/11
date added: 2023/03/11
shelves: favorites
review:
sublime. cette histoire m'a profondément touchée par sa justesse et par sa délicatesse. la plume de Philippe Besson témoigne d'une grande sensibilité et transmet une fébrilité palpable avec ce récit.


« En fin de compte, l'amour n'a été possible que parce qu'il m'a vu non pas tel que j'étais, mais tel que j'allais devenir. »
]]> 3087
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?]]> 119 E.M. Forster 1420925431 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.91 1908
author: E.M. Forster
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1908
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58891551
As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.]]> 390 Douglas Stuart 0802159559 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.37 2022
author: Douglas Stuart
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51281596 432 Phoebe Waller-Bridge 059315827X jules ⭑°⋆ 5 favorites this is my joker. 4.88 2019
author: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.88
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/02
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves: favorites
review:
this is my joker.
]]> 59800356 Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.]]> 480 Evelyn Waugh 0241585317 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2024-tbr 3.95 1945
author: Evelyn Waugh
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1945
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves: to-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 60501778 Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the late 1950s.]]> 435 James Baldwin jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.28 1962
author: James Baldwin
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 534379
Charles Dickens’s most celebrated novel and the author’s own favorite, David Copperfield is the classic account of a boy growing up in a world that is by turns magical, fearful, and grimly realistic. In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired.

This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.]]> 891 Charles Dickens 0679405712 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.19 1850
author: Charles Dickens
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1850
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 96259 Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness�� of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”]]> 80 Richard Siken 0300107897 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.35 2005
author: Richard Siken
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1977835 146 Patrick Modiano 2070408485 jules ⭑°⋆ 2 3.51 1997
author: Patrick Modiano
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/22
date added: 2023/02/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 51113 ]]> 211 Gail Tsukiyama 0312144075 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.15 1995
author: Gail Tsukiyama
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 679464
“Although not strictly autobiographical, Olivia draws on the author’s experiences at finishing schools run by the charismatic Mlle. Marie Souvestre, whose influence lived on through former students like Natalie Barney and Eleanor Roosevelt. Olivia was dedicated to the memory of Strachey’s friend Virginia Woolf and published to acclaim in 1949. Colette wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation of the novel. In 1999, Olivia was included on the Publishing Triangle’s widely publicized list of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of the 20th Century.

“Dorothy Strachey (1865-1960) was the sister of the novelist Lytton Strachey and a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group…��.Olivia, originally published under a pseudonym, is her only novel.�� -- Amazon.com]]> 135 Dorothy Strachey 1573442429 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read, 2024-tbr 3.82 1949
author: Dorothy Strachey
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves: to-read, 2024-tbr
review:

]]> 49977811 Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism,��a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

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

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

Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart,��Swimming in the Dark��is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.]]> 191 Tomasz Jedrowski 006289000X jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.25 2020
author: Tomasz Jedrowski
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12321 Beyond Good and Evil is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale with an introduction by Michael Tanner in Penguin Classics.

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own 'will to power' upon the world.

This edition includes a commentary on the text by the translator and Michael Tanner's introduction, which explains some of the more abstract passages in Beyond Good and Evil.

Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) became the chair of classical philology at Basel University at the age of 24 until his bad health forced him to retire in 1879. He divorced himself from society until his final collapse in 1899 when he became insane. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on subsequent writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was considerable.

If you enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil you might like Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also available in Penguin Classics.

"One of the greatest books of a very great thinker." —Michael Tanner]]> 240 Friedrich Nietzsche 014044923X jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.05 1886
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1886
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 333538 Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman

Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power, previously unknown to English language readers.]]> 328 Franz Kafka 0805211063 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.97 1926
author: Franz Kafka
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1926
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13747794 260 Oscar Wilde 0674066316 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.32 1890
author: Oscar Wilde
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1890
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59842000

Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters is a valuable personal introduction to the artist’s life and work, with illuminating commentaries by experts on the subject.]]> 432 Nienke Bakker 0500295980 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.19
author: Nienke Bakker
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30079724 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.

But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Bettering myself --
Mr. Wu --
Malibu --
The weirdos --
A dark and winding road --
No place for good people --
Slumming --
An honest woman --
The beach boy --
Nothing ever happens here --
Dancing in the moonlight --
The surrogate --
The locked room --
A better place]]> 294 Ottessa Moshfegh 0399562885 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.63 2017
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56648660 Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.]]> 251 Bora Chung 1916277187 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.76 2017
author: Bora Chung
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 38357895
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 3.70 2016
author: Sayaka Murata
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35068705
When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.

But surprises aren’t always good.

Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.

For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .

Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.]]> 545 R.F. Kuang 0062662597 jules ⭑°⋆ 0 to-read 4.16 2018
author: R.F. Kuang
name: jules ⭑°⋆
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>