Jennifer's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:59:31 -0700 60 Jennifer's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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 the Persian Gulf 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.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]>
Monstrilio 62888191 A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]>
336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638930368 Jennifer 4 4.11 2023 Monstrilio
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life]]> 213395553 A heartwarming philosophical meditation on how to live a fulfilling life—inspired by the inherent happiness of dogs.


If you have spent any part of your life with a dog, you may have found certain questions popping, unbidden, into your Is my dog living a fulfilled life? Is my dog a good dog? Does my dog love me? Addressing these questions compels you to confront not just your dog’s life but yours as well—to think about what fulfillment, and meaning, in life really is.


In The Word of Dog, philosopher Mark Rowlands explores these questions and suggests that in dogs we can see hints—faint, shrouded, but discernible—of what a better way of living might look like. Perhaps none of us can be happy in the way a dog can, but The Word of Dog shows us we could do a lot better than we’re doing simply by listening to the unspoken wisdom our dogs reveal to us every day of their happy, uncomplicated lives.]]>
256 Mark Rowlands 1324095687 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 3.81 The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life
author: Mark Rowlands
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift]]> 217452028 A smart, page-turning exploration of the business and creative decisions that transformed Taylor Swift from a teen prodigy into an unprecedented modern cultural phenomenon.

There is no shortage of ways to describe Taylor Swift. Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teen to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, she has blazed a path that is uniquely hers.

But, how exactly, has she managed to scale her success—multiple times—while dominating an industry that cycles through artists and stars as if they were fashion trends? How has she managed to make and remake herself time and again while remaining true to her artistic vision? And how has she managed to master the constant disruption in the music business?

In There's Nothing Like This, Harvard Business Review editor Kevin Evers answers those questions in riveting detail. Employing the same thoughtful analysis that is usually devoted to iconic startup founders, game-changing innovators, and pioneering brands, he chronicles the major business and creative decisions that have defined each era of Swift's career.

Mixing business and art, and analysis and narrative, and pulling from research in a wide range of subjects—including innovation, creativity, psychology, and strategy�There's Nothing Like This analyzes Swift like the modern and multidimensional superstar that she is—a songwriting savant and a strategic genius.

Swift's fans will see their icon from a fresh perspective. Others will gain more than a measure of admiration for her ability to stay at the top of her game. And everyone will come away understanding why, even after two decades, Swift keeps winning.]]>
304 Kevin Evers Jennifer 4 4.34 There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift
author: Kevin Evers
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.34
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Great Believers 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]>
421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Jennifer 5 4.26 2018 The Great Believers
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind]]> 49098237
Drawing upon her years of research and a wealth of remarkable experience, the world-renowned forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black takes us on a journey of revelation. From skull to feet, via the face, spine, chest, arms, hands, pelvis and legs, she shows that each part of us has a tale to tell. What we eat, where we go, everything we do leaves a trace, a message that waits patiently for months, years, sometimes centuries, until a forensic anthropologist is called upon to decipher it.

Some of this information is easily understood, some holds its secrets tight and needs scientific cajoling to be released. But by carefully piecing together the evidence, the facts of a life can be rebuilt. Limb by limb, case by case � some criminal, some historical, some unaccountably bizarre � Sue Black reconstructs with intimate sensitivity and compassion the hidden stories in what we leave behind.]]>
368 Sue Black 0857526901 Jennifer 5 4.33 2020 Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind
author: Sue Black
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]>
You Like It Darker 201242757 From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,� writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,� and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids� explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,� a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,� a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,� a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man� asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.]]>
512 Stephen King 1668037718 Jennifer 4 4.16 2024 You Like It Darker
author: Stephen King
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism]]> 123844668
‘Argues that a radical politics of neurodiversity is necessary, not only for neurodivergent folk, but for our collective liberation’� Professor Hel Spandler, editor, Asylum magazine
‘A vital book that kindles the flames of a neurodivergent revolution’� Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism

Neurodiversity is on the rise. Awareness and diagnoses have exploded in recent years, but we are still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. Beyond simplistic narratives of normativity and difference, this groundbreaking book exposes the very myth of the ‘normal� brain as a product of intensified capitalism.

Exploring the rich histories of the neurodiversity and disability movements, Robert Chapman shows how the rise of capitalism created an ‘empire of normality� that transformed our understanding of the body into that of a productivity machine. Neurodivergent liberation is possible � but only by challenging the deepest logics of capitalism. Empire of Normality is an essential guide to understanding the systems that shape our bodies, minds and deepest selves � and how we can undo them.

Robert Chapman is a neurodivergent philosopher who has taught at King’s College London and Bristol University. They are currently Assistant Professor in Critical Neurodiversity Studies at Durham University. They blog at Psychology Today and at Critical Neurodiversity .ձ>
204 Robert Chapman 0745348661 Jennifer 5 4.34 2023 Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism
author: Robert Chapman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[It Happened One Summer (Bellinger Sisters, #1)]]> 55659629
Piper hasn’t even been in Westport for five minutes when she meets big, bearded sea captain Brendan, who thinks she won’t last a week outside of Beverly Hills. So what if Piper can’t do math, and the idea of sleeping in a shabby apartment with bunk beds gives her hives. How bad could it really be? She’s determined to show her stepfather—and the hot, grumpy local—that she’s more than a pretty face.

Except it’s a small town and everywhere she turns, she bumps into Brendan. The fun-loving socialite and the gruff fisherman are polar opposites, but there’s an undeniable attraction simmering between them. Piper doesn’t want any distractions, especially feelings for a man who sails off into the sunset for weeks at a time. Yet as she reconnects with her past and begins to feel at home in Westport, Piper starts to wonder if the cold, glamorous life she knew is what she truly wants. LA is calling her name, but Brendan—and this town full of memories—may have already caught her heart.

Tessa Bailey is back with a Schitt’s Creek-inspired rom-com about a Hollywood “It Girl� who is cut off from her wealthy family and exiled to a small Pacific Northwest beach town... where she butts heads with a surly, sexy local who thinks she doesn’t belong.]]>
397 Tessa Bailey 0063045656 Jennifer 1 3.91 2021 It Happened One Summer (Bellinger Sisters, #1)
author: Tessa Bailey
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor]]> 123266603 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"A fast-paced debut...Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account." � Publishers Weekly

A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger.

Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials - with the island's residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

Douglas Wada's experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America's first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu's gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war.

Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu's innocent residents - including Douglas Wada's father - who endure the war's anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California.

Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.]]>
272 Mark Harmon 1400337011 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.58 2023 Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
author: Mark Harmon
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Just Add Water: My Swimming Life]]> 203931794 A candid and inspiring memoir from Olympic gold medalist, world champion, and one of the best swimmers ever to compete: Katie Ledecky.

Katie Ledecky has won more individual Olympic races than any female swimmer in history. She is a three-time Olympian, a seven-time gold medalist, a twenty-one-time world champion, eight-time NCAA Champion, and a world record-holder in individual swimming events. Time and again, the question is posed to her family, her coaches, and to her—what makes her a champion? Now, for the first time, she shares what it takes to compete at an elite level.

Again and again, Ledecky has broken records: those of others and, increasingly, her own. She is both consistent and innovative—consistent at setting goals and shattering them, and innovative in the way she approaches her training. A true competitor, she sets her goals by choosing the ones that feel the scariest. But, crucially, she never sacrifices the joy of competition, even in the face of adversity. Her positive mental outlook and a great support system provides the springboard to her success.

Just Add Water charts Ledecky’s life in swimming. It details her start in Bethesda, Maryland, where she played sharks and minnows and first discovered the joy of the pool; her early foray into the Olympics at the tender age of fifteen where, as the youngest member of the American team, she stunned everyone by winning her first gold medal; her time balancing competition and her education at Stanford University; how she developed a champion’s mindset that has allowed her to persevere through so many meets, even under intense pressure; and how she has maintained her dominance in a sport where success depends on milliseconds. You learn how every element of her life—from the support of her family to the tutelage of her coaches, from her childhood spent in summer league swimming to the bright lights of Olympic pools in London, Rio, and Tokyo—set her up to become the champion she is.

In the end, Katie’s story is about testing yourself against the difficult, and seeing who you become on the other side.]]>
256 Katie Ledecky 1668060205 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.13 2024 Just Add Water: My Swimming Life
author: Katie Ledecky
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession]]> 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]>
224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
author: Michael Finkel
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Out of the Woods 209220944
But Sarah has begun to wonder... Who is she without her other half?

When she decides to take on a project of her own, a fundraising gala in memoriam of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove to herself—and to everyone else—that she doesn’t need Caleb’s help to succeed. She’s still her mother’s daughter, after all. Independent and capable.

That is until the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day.

The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances between them and doubts begin to grow. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be?

In a desperate attempt to fix what they fear is near breaking, Sarah and Caleb make the spontaneous decision to join a grueling hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches.

What follows is a life-affirming comedy of errors as two nature-averse people fight their way out of the woods in order to find their way back to their roots.]]>
336 Hannah Bonam-Young 0593871863 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.98 2025 Out of the Woods
author: Hannah Bonam-Young
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.]]>
339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Jennifer 4 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
All My Mothers 57207910
London, 1980s. Though she has a comfortable, privileged life, Eva Martínez-Green is deeply unhappy. The only child of an emotionally absent mother and a physically absent father, Eva has grown up in a cold, unloving house. But Eva is convinced that all is not as it seems. Why are there no baby pictures of her? Why do her parents avoid all questions about her early years?

When her parents� relationship crumbles, Eva begins looking for a different, better life: a proper family, a perfect mother, and, importantly, real love. Her desire to find where she belongs leads Eva on a journey spanning years and continents � and, along the way, she meets women who challenge her idea of what a mother should be, and who will change her life forever…]]>
400 Joanna Glen Jennifer 0 to-read 4.37 2021 All My Mothers
author: Joanna Glen
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer]]> 219484513 Actress and content creator Dylan Mulvaney’s honest account of her journey through girlhood

When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan’s personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. Through her “Days of Girlhood� series, she connected with followers by exploring what it means to be a girl, from experimenting with makeup to story times to spilling the tea about laser hair removal, while never shying away from discussing the transphobia she faced online. Nevertheless, she was determined to be a beacon of positivity.

But shortly after she celebrated day 365 of being a girl, it all came screeching to a halt when an innocuous post sparked a media firestorm and right-wing backlash she couldn’t have expected. Despite the vitriolic press and relentless paparazzi, Dylan was determined to remain loud and proud.

In Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer, Dylan pulls back the curtain of her “It Girl� lifestyle with a witty and intimate reflection of her life pre- and post-transition. She covers everything from her first big break in theater to the first time her dad recognized her as a girl to how she handled scandals, cancellations, and . . . tucking. It’s both laugh-out-loud funny and powerfully honest—and is a love letter to everyone who stands up for queer joy.]]>
266 Dylan Mulvaney 141977039X Jennifer 4 4.12 2025 Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer
author: Dylan Mulvaney
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
Something Wilder 59345253
Leo Grady knew mirages were a thing in the desert, but they’d barely left civilization when the silhouette of his greatest regret comes into focus in the flickering light of the campfire. Ready to leave the past behind him, Leo wants nothing more than to reconnect with his first and only love. Unfortunately, Lily Wilder is all business, drawing a clear line in the sand: it’s never going to happen.

But when the trip goes horribly and hilariously wrong, the group wonders if maybe the legend of the hidden treasure wasn’t a gimmick after all. There’s a chance to right the wrongs—of Duke’s past and their own—but only if Leo and Lily can confront their history and work together. Alone under the stars in the isolated and dangerous mazes of the Canyonlands, Leo and Lily must decide whether they’ll risk their lives and hearts on the adventure of a lifetime.]]>
384 Christina Lauren 1982173408 Jennifer 4 3.64 2022 Something Wilder
author: Christina Lauren
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization]]> 55643282 Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication.

From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.ձ>
369 Edward Slingerland 0316453382 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.77 2021 Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
author: Edward Slingerland
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]>
336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.69 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change]]> 62122504 368 W. David Marx 0593296710 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.89 2022 Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
author: W. David Marx
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
If We Were Villains 30319086
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]>
354 M.L. Rio 125009528X Jennifer 0 to-read 4.11 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World]]> 38743564 An epic true-tale of hubris and greed from two Pulitzer-finalist Wall Street Journal reporters, Billion Dollar Whale reveals how a young social climber pulled off one of the biggest financial heists in history--right under the nose of the global financial industry--exposing the shocking secret nexus of elite wealth, banking, Hollywood, and politics.

The dust had yet to settle on the global financial crisis in 2009 when an unlikely Wharton grad was setting in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.

Billion Dollar Whale will become a classic, harrowing parable about the financial world in the twenty-first century.]]>
400 Tom Wright 031643650X Jennifer 4 4.02 2018 Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
author: Tom Wright
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)]]> 20409231
But when victims of a brutal new serial killer start turning up, the Naturals are pulled into an active case that strikes too close to home: the killer is a perfect copycat of Dean’s incarcerated father—a man he’d do anything to forget. Forced deeper into a murderer’s psyche than ever before, will the Naturals be able to outsmart the enigmatic killer’s brutal mind games before this copycat twists them into his web for good?

With her trademark wit, brilliant plotting, and twists that no one will see coming, Jennifer Lynn Barnes will keep readers on the edge of their seats (and looking over their shoulders) as they race through the pages of this thrilling novel.]]>
375 Jennifer Lynn Barnes 1423168321 Jennifer 5 4.27 2014 Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)
author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Naturals (The Naturals, #1)]]> 13597723
What Cassie doesn’t realize is that there’s more at risk than a few unsolved homicides—especially when she’s sent to live with a group of teens whose gifts are as unusual as her own. Sarcastic, privileged Michael has a knack for reading emotions, which he uses to get inside Cassie’s head—and under her skin. Brooding Dean shares Cassie’s gift for profiling, but keeps her at arm’s length.

Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms closer than Cassie could ever have imagined. Caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse with a killer, the Naturals are going to have to use all of their gifts just to survive.]]>
308 Jennifer Lynn Barnes 1423168232 Jennifer 4 4.22 2013 The Naturals (The Naturals, #1)
author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1)]]> 46000520
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

Alternate cover edition can be found here .]]>
382 Richard Osman Jennifer 3 3.86 2020 The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1)
author: Richard Osman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft]]> 4573498 The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser is a fascinating account of a brazen and amazing criminal act—a book that could help police and investigators solve the mystery of the 1990 break-in and burglary at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “A tantalizing whodunit� (Boston Globe) and a “riveting, wonderfully vivid account [that] takes you into the underworld of obsessed art detectives, con men, and thieves� (Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting), The Gardner Heist is true crime history at its most spellbinding.]]> 272 Ulrich Boser 0061451835 Jennifer 4 3.69 2009 The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
author: Ulrich Boser
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King]]> 63099194 A thought-provoking exploration of the Black musicians who inspired Elvis Presley’s music, primarily through the lens of four overlooked Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur “Big Boy� Crudup, and Calvin Newborn

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters in the summer of 2022, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King�, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them.

Within these pages, Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies, and interactions with Elvis Presley of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock ’n� Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur “Big Boy� Crudup, and most revealingly, the mostly-unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn, whose portrayal will be a revelation to even the most seasoned Elvis Presley and rock devotees. Lauterbach makes a convincing case that Newborn is the key to understanding where Presley’s music and performance style came from. And Lauterbach has the receipts, the dates, the interviews, and the confirmation of Presley’s presence and key club engagements, and the recording sessions. Along the way, he delves into the injustices of copyright theft and media segregation that resulted in Black artists living in poverty as white performers, managers, and producers reaped the lucrative rewards.

In the wake of continuing conversations about American music and appropriation, Before Elvis is indispensable.]]>
320 Preston Lauterbach 0306833085 Jennifer 3 3.82 Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King
author: Preston Lauterbach
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]>
Beautiful Ugly 211004123 The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .
. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible � a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.
]]>
306 Alice Feeney 125033778X Jennifer 4 3.63 2025 Beautiful Ugly
author: Alice Feeney
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters]]> 157981712
A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember , pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power-- and its quirks--we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.]]>
304 Charan Ranganath 038554863X Jennifer 5 3.91 2024 Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters
author: Charan Ranganath
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
The God of the Woods 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 Jennifer 5 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:

]]>
How to Raise an Antiracist 59149034 The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: How do we talk to our children about it? How do we raise our children to avoid repeating our racist history and the ongoing errors of the present? While we do the work of dismantling racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists?

After he wrote the National Book Award–winning Stamped from the Beginning, readers asked Ibram Kendi, “How can I be antiracist?� After he wrote the bestsellers How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, readers began asking a different question: “How do I raise an antiracist child?� This is a question Dr. Kendi had been asking himself ever since he became a teacher—but the question became more personal and urgent when he found out his partner, Sadiqa, was pregnant. Like many parents, he didn’t know how answer the question—and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He didn’t want to educate his child on antiracism; he wanted to shield her from the toxicity of racism altogether.

But research and experience changed his mind: He realized that antiracism has to be taught and modeled as early as possible—not just to armor them against the racism that is still indoctrinated and normalized in our children’s world, but to remind parents and caregivers to build a more just future for us all.

Following the model of his bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines vital scholarship with a compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent to create a work whose advice is grounded in research and relatable real-world experience. The chapters follow the stages of child development and don’t just help parents to raise antiracists, but also to create an antiracist world for them to grow and thrive in.]]>
288 Ibram X. Kendi 059324253X Jennifer 5 4.41 2022 How to Raise an Antiracist
author: Ibram X. Kendi
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters]]> 177058906 Want to know what chaos theory can teach us about human events? In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas.

If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.]]>
335 Brian Klaas Jennifer 5 4.08 2024 Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
author: Brian Klaas
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Wings Upon Her Back 198821102
Five gods lie mysteriously sleeping above the city of Radezhda. Five gods who once bestowed great technologies and wisdom, each inspiring the devotion of their own sect. When the gods turned away from humanity, their followers built towers to the heavens to find out why. But when no answer was given, the collective grief of the sects turned to desperation, and eventually to war.

Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai.

But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out, and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.]]>
336 Samantha Mills 1616964146 Jennifer 4 3.96 2024 The Wings Upon Her Back
author: Samantha Mills
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Book of Doors 156009464
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers—a lonely yet charming old man—dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by. Nothing but the last book he was reading.

But this is no ordinary book�

It is the Book of Doors.

Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them.

Then she’s approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox. He’s a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. The tome now in Cassie’s possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.

Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there.

But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force—in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman—is at the very top of that list.]]>
404 Gareth Brown 0063323982 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.01 2024 The Book of Doors
author: Gareth Brown
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Fragile Threads of Power (Threads of Power, #1)]]> 111673828 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and set in the world of A Darker Shade of Magic, V. E. Schwab opens a new door into perilous adventure and tangled schemes with The Fragile Threads of Power.

Once, there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power, and connected by a single city: London. Until the magic grew too fast, and forced the worlds to seal the doors between them in a desperate gamble to protect their own. The few magicians who could still open the doors grew more rare as time passed and now, only three Antari are known in recent memory―Kell Maresh of Red London, Delilah Bard of Grey London, and Holland Vosijk, of White London.

But barely a glimpse of them have been seen in the last seven years―and a new Antari named Kosika has appeared in White London, taking the throne in Holland's absence. The young queen is willing to feed her city with blood, including her own―but her growing religious fervor has the potential to drown them instead.

And back in Red London, King Rhy Maresh is threatened by a rising rebellion, one determined to correct the balance of power by razing the throne entirely.

Amidst this tapestry of old friends and new enemies, a girl with an unusual magical ability comes into possession of a device that could change the fate of all four worlds.

Her name is Tes, and she's the only one who can bring them together―or unravel it all.]]>
648 Victoria E. Schwab 0765387492 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.25 2023 The Fragile Threads of Power (Threads of Power, #1)
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]>
307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Jennifer 5 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World]]> 32191676 American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius.]]> 330 David Baron 1631490168 Jennifer 5 3.74 2017 American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World
author: David Baron
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Night Watchman 46206688
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation� bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination� that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run�?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.]]>
453 Louise Erdrich 0062671189 Jennifer 5 4.06 2020 The Night Watchman
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]>
310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood
author: Lucy Jones
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Grandest Game (The Grandest Game, #1)]]> 197392670 Get caught up in the puzzles, games, danger, romance, and riches of this lush new chapter in the #1 bestselling Inheritance Games saga—set a year after we last saw Avery and the Hawthornes.

Seven tickets. An island of dreams. The chance of a lifetime.

Welcome to the Grandest Game, an annual competition run by billionaire Avery Grambs and the four infamous Hawthorne brothers, whose family fortune she inherited. Designed to give anyone a shot at fame and fortune, this year’s game requires one of seven golden tickets to enter. With millions on the line, those seven players will do whatever it takes to win.

Some of the players are in it for the money. Some for power. Some for reasons all their own. Every single one of them has secrets. Amidst it all is Grayson Hawthorne, tasked with a vital role in this year’s game. But as tensions rise and the mind-bending challenges push the players to their limits—physically, mentally, and emotionally—it soon becomes clear that not everyone is playing by the rules.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes delivers a new series in the world of The Inheritance Games, where fan-favorite and new characters collide in a game you’ll never forget.

Do you have what it takes to play?
]]>
384 Jennifer Lynn Barnes 0316481017 Jennifer 3 3.93 2024 The Grandest Game (The Grandest Game, #1)
author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way]]> 29
From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.

Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language.]]>
270 Bill Bryson 0380715430 Jennifer 4 3.91 1990 The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
author: Bill Bryson
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]>
304 John Green 0525555218 Jennifer 5 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/13
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America]]> 55959466 From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.

America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an almost true story.

It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie.

Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF.ձ>
432 Michael Harriot 0358439167 Jennifer 5 4.59 2023 Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America
author: Michael Harriot
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:

]]>
Beach Read 52867387 A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no-one will fall in love. Really.]]>
371 Emily Henry 1984806734 Jennifer 4 3.99 2020 Beach Read
author: Emily Henry
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]>
Intermezzo 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 Jennifer 2 3.87 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World]]> 75484380
In a thrilling, colourful narrative enriched with the latest archaeological discoveries, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes walks through the landscapes of both ancient and modern time; on a journey whose purpose is to ask why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others. She explores traces of the Wonders themselves, and the traces they have left in history. A majestic work of historical storytelling, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World reinforces the exciting, and nourishing, notion that humans can make the impossible happen.]]>
416 Bettany Hughes 1474610358 Jennifer 4 3.94 2024 The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
author: Bettany Hughes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Loathe to Love You (The STEMinist Novellas, #1-3)]]> 59054191 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis comes a collection of steamy, STEMinist novellas featuring a trio of engineers and their loves in loathing—with a special bonus chapter!

Under One Roof
An environmental engineer discovers that scientists should never cohabitate when she finds herself stuck with the roommate from hell—a detestable big-oil lawyer who won't leave the thermostat alone.

Stuck with You
A civil engineer and her nemesis take their rivalry—and love—to the next level when they get stuck in a New York elevator.

Below Zero
A NASA aerospace engineer's frozen heart melts as she lies injured and stranded at a remote Arctic research station and the only person willing to undertake the dangerous rescue mission is her longtime rival.]]>
370 Ali Hazelwood 1408726777 Jennifer 4 3.83 2023 Loathe to Love You (The STEMinist Novellas, #1-3)
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]>
Lovely One: A Memoir 203164398 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � In her inspiring, intimate memoir, the first Black woman to ever be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States chronicles her extraordinary life story.

With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.

Named “Ketanji Onyika,� meaning “Lovely One,� based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations.

Here, Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.

Through trials and triumphs, Justice Jackson’s journey will resonate with dreamers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and refuse to be turned aside. This moving, open-hearted tale will spread hope for a more just world, for generations to come.]]>
432 Ketanji Brown Jackson 0593729900 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.45 2024 Lovely One: A Memoir
author: Ketanji Brown Jackson
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 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.]]>
563 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Jennifer 0 to-read 4.52 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Eve in Hollywood 17972257 The further adventures of Eve Ross, best friend of Katey Kontent in Rules of Civility, the New York Times bestselling novel by Amor Towles

Near the end of Amor Towles’s bestselling novel Rules of Civility, the fiercely independent Evelyn Ross boards a train from New York to Chicago to visit her parents, but never disembarks. Six months later, she appears in a photograph in a gossip magazine exiting the Tropicana Club on Sunset Boulevard on the arm of Olivia de Havilland.

In this novella made up of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs off Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with the Wind.

With the glamour and grit of the studio system’s golden age as a backdrop, Towles introduces in each story a memorable new character whose fate may well be altered by their encounter with Eve. In following the thread of these varied encounters, we watch as Eve forges a new and unexpected life for herself in late 1930s Los Angeles.
]]>
91 Amor Towles Jennifer 4 3.69 2013 Eve in Hollywood
author: Amor Towles
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
Table for Two 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Jennifer 4 4.15 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Aztec Empire: An Enthralling Overview of the History of the Aztecs, Starting with the Settlement in the Valley of Mexico (Ancient Mexico)]]> 58530639 If you are curious about how the extraordinary Aztecs lived and ran their empire, then keep reading!The remarkable Aztecs formed a vast, organized empire renown for military prowess, expansive trade, intriguing culture, and ingenious agriculture � all from an island in a swamp. But where was their mysterious homeland of Aztlan? How did they ascend to dominance in the Valley of Mexico?Explore the mesmerizing origins of the Aztecs, discover how a wandering desert tribe came to rule much of present-day Mexico, and investigate the spectacular � albeit somewhat depraved � culture that set their civilization apart.This easy-to-read, comprehensive, and engaging history of the Aztec Empire will unlock the little-known and awe-inspiring stories and culture of a legendary people. This well-researched and authoritative presentation, accompanied by striking illustrations, brings the Aztec civilization to life. Here are some of the fascinating questions you will secrets have recent archaeological finds uncovered about the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures?How did the startling cultures that existed before the Aztecs influence them? What made these pre-existing cultures famous?What prophesies propelled the Mexica into their empire-building destiny and formed their self-identity?Why did the Mexica build their astonishing city on an island in the middle of a lake? How did it grow into one of the largest cities in the world at that time?Was their mysterious homeland of Aztlan a real place? If so, where was it?What’s this story about an eagle on a cactus eating a rattlesnake?How did the Mexica turn the tables to rule over the tribes that once dominated them?What intrigue led to the coalition armies and the Triple Alliance?How did the Aztecs form their extensive network of power and organize their far-flung city-states?What were their mythology and religion like? Did they actually practice human sacrifice?How did they use their stunning sculptures and brilliant artwork as a type of propaganda?Were they really one of the first civilizations to require education for all classes and both boys and girls?What did they eat? Was it anything like present-day Mexican food?How did the common people live? What did they do for fun?What did the Aztecs do when the Spaniards landed in their territory?How did conquistador Hernán Cortés cunningly form alliances with the Aztecs� enemies?And much, much more!Scroll up and click the “add to cart� button to learn more about the incredible Aztecs!]]> 265 Enthralling History Jennifer 3 3.94 The Aztec Empire: An Enthralling Overview of the History of the Aztecs, Starting with the Settlement in the Valley of Mexico (Ancient Mexico)
author: Enthralling History
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land]]> 199639510
Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. That changed on July 9, 2020, when a high-profile Supreme Court case—which originated with a small-town murder two decades earlier—affirmed the reservation of Muscogee Nation. The ruling resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, merely because the Court chose to follow the law.

In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was create on top of their land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, when a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen, his defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma argued that reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court no more. The ruling would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation.

Nagle tells the story of the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in Eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, Indian Territory stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed in its long history of greed, corruption and lawlessness, and the Indigenous resistance that has shaped our country.ձ>
352 Rebecca Nagle 006311206X Jennifer 0 to-read 4.38 2024 By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
author: Rebecca Nagle
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve]]> 195791316 256 Drew Afualo 0374614059 Jennifer 5 4.33 2024 Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve
author: Drew Afualo
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:

]]>
Assassination Vacation 3110 Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other—a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.

From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and—the author's favorite� historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.]]>
258 Sarah Vowell 074326004X Jennifer 5 3.93 2005 Assassination Vacation
author: Sarah Vowell
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves:
review:

]]>
Here One Moment 208516656 If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.�

Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.

If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.]]>
512 Liane Moriarty 0593798600 Jennifer 5 3.98 2024 Here One Moment
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Witches: Salem, 1692 24819449 Cleopatra, provides an electrifying, fresh view of the Salem witch trials.

The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.

The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled--in crackling detail and lyrical prose--by one of our most acclaimed historians.]]>
498 Stacy Schiff 0316200603 Jennifer 4 3.27 2015 The Witches: Salem, 1692
author: Stacy Schiff
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:

]]>
First Lie Wins 164444179 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593492918.

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn’t like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .]]>
340 Ashley Elston Jennifer 4 3.97 2024 First Lie Wins
author: Ashley Elston
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]>
Hello Beautiful 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 Jennifer 4 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom]]> 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 Jennifer 5 3.95 2023 Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
author: Ilyon Woo
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves:
review:

]]>
Dark Matter 19381068 A terrifying 1930s ghost story set in the haunting wilderness of the far north. January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken.But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...]]> 224 Michelle Paver 1409123804 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.97 2010 Dark Matter
author: Michelle Paver
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln]]> 2199 Winner of the Lincoln Prize

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.

Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.]]>
916 Doris Kearns Goodwin Jennifer 0 to-read 4.27 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Bright Young Women 101124639
The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]>
384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 Jennifer 5 3.99 2023 Bright Young Women
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage]]> 139069 The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age.

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

First edition: here.]]>
282 Alfred Lansing Jennifer 5 4.42 1959 Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
author: Alfred Lansing
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Champions 205181079 From the author of The Cheerleaders comes another dark YA thriller set in the same town of Sunnybrook. When a mysterious accident befalls a member of the all-star high school football team, the town's deadly history stands to repeat itself—and the price of discovering the truth is higher than anyone could imagine.It was the deaths of five cheerleaders that made the town of Sunnybrook infamous. Eleven years later, the girls' killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school's championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook’s homegrown heroes--something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past.Hadley could care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team's latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poisoned at a party, and almost immediately after, Hadley starts getting strange emails warning her to stay far away from the football team.It's becoming clear Sunnybrook's golden boys have secrets, and after a second player is mysteriously killed, Hadley’s beginning to suspect that someone wants the team to pay for their sins. Or does this new target on the football team have something to do with what happened to the cheerleaders all those years ago?As an outsider in Sunnybrook, Hadley feels like she's the only one who can see the present clearly, but it looks like she’s going to have to dig up the darkness of the past to get to the bottom of what’s happening now. Luckily, there are still some Sunnybrook High grads who never left--people who were around eleven years ago—and if she can just convince them to talk, she might be able stop a killer before another Tiger dies.]]> 336 Kara Thomas 0593379977 Jennifer 4 3.74 2024 The Champions
author: Kara Thomas
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Be Ready When the Luck Happens]]> 209192698 In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.]]>
320 Ina Garten 0593799895 Jennifer 5 4.25 2024 Be Ready When the Luck Happens
author: Ina Garten
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Office of Historical Corrections]]> 51777605 The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.]]>
269 Danielle Evans 1594487332 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.15 2020 The Office of Historical Corrections
author: Danielle Evans
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers]]> 138378691
A gripping narrative in the tradition of A Civil Action and Toms River

Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century--that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a boat for the lake.

But it was also the kind of job that gave you bladder cancer.

The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence.

In doing so it tells a story of corporate malfeasance and governmental neglect. Workers have only weak protections from exposure to toxic substances in America, and regulatory breaches contribute to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant's workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases--and deaths--was undeniable. Based on four decades of reporting and delving deeply into the scientific literature about toxic substances and health risks, the arcana of worker regulations, and reality of loose enforcement, The Cancer Factory exposes the sometimes deadly risks too many workers face.]]>
264 Jim Morris 0807059145 Jennifer 4 3.92 The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers
author: Jim Morris
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow]]> 57390604
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.

But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.

Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.]]>
417 Zoulfa Katouh 0316351377 Jennifer 5 4.48 2022 As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
author: Zoulfa Katouh
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe]]> 58284109 The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical's deadly secret of Love Canal--exposing one of America's most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today.

Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. But in the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn't take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly sweet smell of chemicals.

In this propulsive work of narrative storytelling, NYT journalist Keith O'Brien uncovers how Gibbs and Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal--Love Canal, it was called--that Hooker Chemical, the city's largest employer, had quietly filled with twenty thousand tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick.

O'Brien braids together previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical's deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn't; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the EPA, the White House, and even President Jimmy Carter. By the time it was over, they would capture America's imagination.

Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare the dauntless efforts of a few women who--years before Erin Brockovich took up the mantle-- fought to rescue their community and their lives from the effects of corporate pollution and laid foundation for the modern environmental movement as we know it today.]]>
455 Keith O'Brien 0593318439 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.39 2022 Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe
author: Keith O'Brien
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Big Little Lies 33516773 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

From the author of Truly Madly Guilty and The Husband s Secret comes a novel about the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.

A murder...A tragic accident...Or just parents behaving badly? What’s indisputable is that someone is dead.

Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare but she is paying a price for the illusion of perfection. New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for a nanny. She comes with a mysterious past and a sadness beyond her years. These three women are at different crossroads, but they will all wind up in the same shocking place.

Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the little lies that can turn lethal.]]>
460 Liane Moriarty 0399587195 Jennifer 4 4.40 2014 Big Little Lies
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]>
Before and After 44908411
The incredible, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal--some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate's bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents--hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.

The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.

Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. In Before and After, Wingate and Christie tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with Wingate and Christie to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children's Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.]]>
320 Judy Christie 0593130146 Jennifer 5 3.93 2019 Before and After
author: Judy Christie
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]>
Unfamiliar Fishes 8857310
Of all the countries the United States invaded or colonized in 1898, Vowell considers the story of the Americanization of Hawaii to be the most intriguing. From the arrival of the New England missionaries in 1820, who came to Christianize the local heathen, to the coup d'etat led by the missionaries' sons in 1893, overthrowing the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling if often appalling or tragic characters. Whalers who will fire cannons at the Bible-thumpers denying them their god-given right to whores. An incestuous princess pulled between her new god and her brother-husband. Sugar barons, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen, a songwriter whose sentimental ode "Aloha 'Oe" serenaded the first Hawaii-born president of the United States during his 2009 inaugural parade.

With Vowell's trademark wry insights and reporting, she lights out to discover the odd, emblematic, and exceptional history of the fiftieth state. In examining the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn, she finds America again, warts and all.]]>
238 Sarah Vowell 1594487871 Jennifer 4 3.62 2011 Unfamiliar Fishes
author: Sarah Vowell
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves:
review:

]]>
Incidents Around the House 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’sMommy,Daddo,and Grandma Ruth.But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”�

When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.

Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.

But Other Mommy needs an answer.

Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]>
367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Jennifer 2 3.61 2024 Incidents Around the House
author: Josh Malerman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Lafayette in the Somewhat United States]]> 24602886 From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and Unfamiliar Fishes, a humorous and insightful account of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette--the one Frenchman we could all agree on--and an insightful portrait of a nation's idealism and its reality.

On August 16, 1824, an elderly French gentlemen sailed into New York Harbor and giddy Americans were there to welcome him. Or, rather, to welcome him back. It had been thirty years since the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette had last set foot in the United States, and he was so beloved that 80,000 people showed up to cheer for him. The entire population of New York at the time was 120,000.

Lafayette's arrival in 1824 coincided with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, Congress had just fought its first epic battle over slavery, and the threat of a Civil War loomed. But Lafayette, belonging to neither North nor South, to no political party or faction, was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what they wanted this country to be. His return was not just a reunion with his beloved Americans, it was a reunion for Americans with their own astonishing singular past.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is a humorous and insightful portrait of the famed Frenchman, the impact he had on our young country, and his ongoing relationship with some of the instrumental Americans of the time, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and many more.]]>
274 Sarah Vowell 1594631743 Jennifer 4 3.82 2015 Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
author: Sarah Vowell
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)]]> 199347538 Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges!

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.

He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.]]>
416 T.J. Klune 125088120X Jennifer 5 4.17 2024 Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)
author: T.J. Klune
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America]]> 176443829
Slut. Shrew. Sinful. Scold. The 19th- and early 20th-century American women profiled in this collection were called all these names and worse when they were alive. And that’s just fine.

These glorious dames earned those monikers, and one hundred years later they can wear them proudly! They refused to conform to societal standards. They bucked everyday niceties and blazed their own trails. They were collectively unbecoming as women, but they forever changed what women can become.

With irresistible charm and laugh-out-loud impertinence, New York Times bestselling author Therese Oneill chronicles the lives of eighteen unbecoming ladies whose audacity, courage, and sheer disdain for lady-like expectations left them out of so many history books. Curious readers will learn about forgotten heroines such
-Dr. Mary Edwards who, despite being the only woman ever awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, was shunned and forgotten due to her insistence on wearing pants in public.
-Elizabeth whose careful record of her own unjust incarceration in a 19th century madhouse by her husband (her not wanting to be Presbyterian anymore) led to nationwide law reforms to protect the rights of those with mental health issues.
-Lilian best remembered for being the real-life mom of Cheaper by the Dozen but who probably should be remembered for scientifically removing the stigma of the sanitary napkin and designing the modern-day kitchen.
-And many more!

With dozens of illustrations and historical photographs throughout, Unbecoming a Lady shines a light on unforgettable, impressive women who deserve to be remembered.]]>
256 Therese Oneill 1982199709 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.64 Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America
author: Therese Oneill
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes]]> 62669265 A detailed guide to surviving history’s most challenging threats, from outrunning dinosaurs to making it off the Titanic alive

History is the most dangerous place on Earth. From dinosaurs the size of locomotives to meteors big enough to sterilize the planet, from famines to pandemics, from tornadoes to the Chicxulub asteroid, the odds of human survival are slim but not zero—at least, not if you know where to go and what to do.

In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history’s greatest threats: getting eaten by dinosaurs, being destroyed by the asteroid that wiped them out, succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, being devoured by the Donner Party, drowning during the sinking of the Titanic, falling prey to the Black Death, and more. Using hindsight and modern science to estimate everything from how fast you’d need to run to outpace a T. rex to the advantages of different body types in surviving the Donner Party tragedy, Cassidy gives you a detailed battle plan for survival while helping you learn about the era.]]>
195 Cody Cassidy 0143136402 Jennifer 5 4.04 2023 How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes
author: Cody Cassidy
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family]]> 194803883 The riveting story of five families shattered by pernicious, pervasive conspiracy theories, and how we might set ourselves free from a crisis that could haunt American life for generations.

“SHED MY DNA�: three excruciating words uttered by a QAnon-obsessed mother, once a highly respected lawyer, to her only son, once the closest person in her life. QAnon beliefs and adjacent conspiracy theories have had devastating political consequences as they’ve exploded in popularity. What’s often overlooked is the lasting havoc they wreak on our society at its most basic and intimate level—the family.

In The Quiet Damage, celebrated reporter Jesselyn Cook paints a harrowing portrait of the vulnerabilities that have left so many of us susceptible to outrageous falsehoods promising order, purpose, and control. Braided throughout are the stories of five American families: an elderly couple whose fifty-year romance takes a heartbreaking turn; millennial sisters of color who grew up in dire poverty—one to become a BLM activist, the other, a hardcore conspiracy theorist pulling her little boy down the rabbit hole with her; a Bay Area hippie-type and her business-executive fiancé, who must decide whether to stay with her as she turns into a stranger before his eyes; evangelical parents whose simple life in a sleepy suburb spirals into delusion-fueled chaos; and a rural mother-son duo who, after carrying each other through unspeakable tragedy, stop speaking at all as ludicrous untruths shatter a bond long thought unbreakable.

Charting the arc of each believer’s path from their first intersection with conspiracy theories to the depths of their cultish conviction, to—in some cases—their rejection of disinformation and the mending of fractured relationships, Cook offers a rare, intimate look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable. Profound, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, The Quiet Damage lays bare how we have been taken hostage by grifters peddling lies built on false hope—and how we might release our loved ones, and ourselves, from their grasp.]]>
250 Jesselyn Cook 059344325X Jennifer 0 to-read 4.46 2024 The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family
author: Jesselyn Cook
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
That's Not My Name 123429195
Shivering and bruised, a teen wakes up on the side of a dirt road with no memory of how she got there―or who she is. A passing officer takes her to the police station, and not long after, a frantic man arrives. He's been searching for her for hours. He has her school ID, her birth certificate, and even family photos. He is her father. Her name is Mary. Or so he says.

When Lola slammed the car door and stormed off into the night, Drew thought they just needed some time to cool off. Except Lola disappeared, and the sheriff, his friends, and the whole town are convinced Drew murdered his girlfriend. Forget proving his innocence, he needs to find her before it's too late. The longer Lola is missing, the fewer leads there are to follow…and the more danger they both are in.]]>
297 Megan Lally 1728270111 Jennifer 4 4.04 2023 That's Not My Name
author: Megan Lally
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War]]> 177772411 Every day the news is filled with stories of extreme weather that threatens our cities, our health, our tornadoes wiping out whole communities; droughts that ignite catastrophic wildfires; storms flooding roads and destroying infrastructure; rising water levels that jeopardize entire nations; new climate-related diseases that threaten our health. Just as World War II raised an existential threat that united Americans in a common cause, the dangers of climate change are similarly challenging all of our previously held notions of the future—and our only hope, as Tom Steyer sees it, is to unite together to take action in a collective movement akin to a war effort. Steyer has been on the forefront of the climate war for well over a decade, leveraging his investment expertise, business knowledge, and community-organizing skills to support sustainable climate solutions. In this accessible book—aimed at reaching everyone from Wall Street investors to college students—he explains how capitalism is an effective tool for scaling climate progress, offers his candid take on fossil fuel enablers, and explains why immediate action on the climate front will not only be our key to a healthy and viable future but also an investment in the future of our economy. Steyer tells his own story of coming to understand the urgency of climate action, and, in short, interstitial chapters, he showcases the inspiring work of people on the front lines, whose innovative approaches provide hope for meaningful change. The urgency to act is imperative—and time is running out—and yet Steyer feels confident that we will win this war, precisely because there has never before been a moment more necessary or more rewarding to come together to secure a healthy future for ourselves and the planet.]]> 280 Tom Steyer 1954118643 Jennifer 4 3.85 Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War
author: Tom Steyer
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth]]> 196774338
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.]]>
304 Zoë Schlanger 0063073854 Jennifer 5 4.28 2024 The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
author: Zoë Schlanger
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:

]]>
Wrong Place Wrong Time 59947696
It is midnight on the morning of Halloween, and Jen anxiously waits up for her 18-year-old son, Todd, to return home. But worries about his broken curfew transform into something much more dangerous when Todd finally emerges from the darkness. As Jen watches through the window, she sees her funny, seemingly happy teenage son stab a total stranger.

She doesn’t know who the victim is, or why Todd has committed such a devastating act of violence. All she knows is that her life, and Todd’s, have been shattered.

After her son is taken into custody, Jen falls asleep in despair. But when she wakes up� it is yesterday. The murder has not happened yet—and there may be a chance to stop it. Each morning, when Jen wakes, she is further back in the past, first weeks, then years, before the murder. And Jen realizes that somewhere in the past lies the trigger for Todd’s terrible crime…and it is her mission to find it, and prevent it from taking place.]]>
416 Gillian McAllister 0063252341 Jennifer 4 3.95 2022 Wrong Place Wrong Time
author: Gillian McAllister
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[How to Live When a Loved One Dies: Healing Meditations for Grief and Loss]]> 55973216 This comforting and accessible Zen mindfulness guide offers short affirmations and in-depth healing support for those moving through intense grief and lossIn the immediate aftermath of a loss, sometimes it is all we can do to keep breathing. With his signature clarity and compassion, Zen MasterThich Nhat Hanh will guide you through the storm of emotions surrounding the death of a loved one.How To Live When A Loved One Dies offers powerful practices such as mindful breathing that will help you reconcile with death and loss, feel connected to your loved one long after they have gone, and transform your grief into healing and joy.]]> 167 Thich Nhat Hanh 1946764817 Jennifer 0 4.29 How to Live When a Loved One Dies: Healing Meditations for Grief and Loss
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Me vs Brain: An Overthinker’s Guide to Life]]> 60555269 Me: No don't say that, I've not got time for this!
Brain: The house is probably on fire!
Me: Stop it, I need to write this book description.
Brain: But the blazing fire.
Me: We didn't even use the oven today.
Brain: But what if -
Me: No. We're not doing this, I'm finishing this description.

Hello there! Hayley Morris here. Or you might know me as the Brain Girl, and don't be fooled...it's not because I'm outrageously smart. Just an avid overthinker. I'm on a mission to prove once and for all that You. Are. Normal. Running through imaginary arguments whilst showering, hiding your knickers in the nurse's office before they look directly into your vagina, or not knowing how to be a normal human when you have the plumber over. I've spent the majority of my life saying and doing embarrassing things that wake me up in a cold sweat at 3am as my Brain reminds me of every minor detail.

In this book, I've overthought absolutely everything so you don't have to. I'll be talking about everything from dating to discharge, mental health to menstrual cups. I might not be able to banish your anxiety or make you feel 100% comfortable in your skin, but I hope I can at least give you a break from the constant brain chatter and we can rejoice and laugh at how similar we actually all are.]]>
304 Hayley Morris Jennifer 3 3.86 Me vs Brain: An Overthinker’s Guide to Life
author: Hayley Morris
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Friend Zone (The Friend Zone, #1)]]> 41945163
Planning her best friend's wedding is bittersweet for Kristen—especially when she meets the best man, Josh Copeland. He's funny, sexy, never offended by her mile-wide streak of sarcasm, and always one chicken enchilada ahead of her hangry. Even her dog, Stuntman Mike, adores him. The only catch: Josh wants a big family someday. Kristen knows he'd be better off with someone else, but as their attraction grows, it's harder and harder to keep him at arm's length.

The Friend Zone will have you laughing one moment and grabbing for tissues the next as it tackles the realities of infertility and loss with wit, heart, and a lot of sass.]]>
372 Abby Jimenez Jennifer 2 3.85 2019 The Friend Zone (The Friend Zone, #1)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction]]> 59627738 "This book is for any parent who has ever struggled under the substantial weight of caregiving--which is to say, all of us. Good Inside is not only a wise and practical guide to raising resilient, emotionally healthy kids, it's also a supportive resource for overwhelmed parents who need more compassion and less stress. Dr. Becky is the smart, thoughtful, in-the-trenches parenting expert we've been waiting for!"--Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space

Dr. Becky Kennedy, wildly popular parenting expert and creator of @drbeckyatgoodinside, shares her groundbreaking approach to raising kids and offers practical strategies for parenting in a way that feels good.

Over the past several years, Dr. Becky Kennedy--known to her followers as "Dr. Becky"--has been sparking a parenting revolution. Millions of parents, tired of following advice that either doesn't work or simply doesn't feel good, have embraced Dr. Becky's empowering and effective approach, a model that prioritizes connecting with our kids over correcting them.

Parents have long been sold a model of childrearing that simply doesn't work. From reward charts to time outs, many popular parenting approaches are based on shaping behavior, not raising humans. These techniques don't build the skills kids need for life, or account for their complex emotional needs. Add to that parents' complicated relationships with their own upbringings, and it's easy to see why so many caretakers feel lost, burned out, and worried they're failing their kids. In Good Inside, Dr. Becky shares her parenting philosophy, complete with actionable strategies, that will help parents move from uncertainty and self-blame to confidence and sturdy leadership.

Offering perspective-shifting parenting principles and troubleshooting for specific scenarios--including sibling rivalry, separation anxiety, tantrums, and more--Good Inside is a comprehensive resource for a generation of parents looking for a new way to raise their kids while still setting them up for a lifetime of self-regulation, confidence, and resilience.]]>
336 Becky Kennedy 0063159481 Jennifer 5 4.53 Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction
author: Becky Kennedy
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/23
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves:
review:

]]>
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde 173404023
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.]]>
352 Tia Williams 153872670X Jennifer 5 3.97 2024 A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
author: Tia Williams
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Paradise Problem 199797582
Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch.

Due to an antiquated clause in his grandfather’s will, Liam won’t see a penny until he’s been happily married for five years. Just when Liam thinks he’s in the home stretch, pressure mounts from his family to see this mysterious spouse, and he has no choice but to turn to the one person he’s afraid to introduce to his one-percenter parents � his unpolished, not-so-ex-wife.

But in the presence of his family, Liam’s fears quickly shift from whether the feisty, foul-mouthed, paint-splattered Anna can play the part to whether the toxic world of wealth will corrupt someone as pure of heart as his surprisingly grounded and loyal wife. Liam will have to ask himself if the price tag on his flimsy cover story is worth losing true love that sprouted from a lie.]]>
352 Christina Lauren 1668017725 Jennifer 3 4.07 2024 The Paradise Problem
author: Christina Lauren
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves:
review:

]]>
Sociopath: A Memoir 176443093
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing� felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.]]>
368 Patric Gagne 166800318X Jennifer 4 3.74 2024 Sociopath: A Memoir
author: Patric Gagne
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]>
Funny Story 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]>
400 Emily Henry Jennifer 4 4.21 2024 Funny Story
author: Emily Henry
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial]]> 57693411
Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed?

Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions.

With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.]]>
320 Mona Chollet 125027141X Jennifer 4 3.86 2018 In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
author: Mona Chollet
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit]]> 62919383
When the pandemic essentially brought the world to a standstill, author Julio Gambuto came to understand a powerful in the pre-pandemic world, Americans were exhausted, lonely, unhappy, wildly overworked and overbooked, drowning in sea of constantly being on the go and needing to buy more, more, more. But when that pressure disappeared, people rediscovered what was important to them. They quit jobs that made them unhappy and moved their families to suburbs. Simple things like outdoor walks replaced gym memberships; home cooking and backyard gardens replaced takeout; less commuting meant more time for family and creative projects; and for perhaps the first time in a long time, people were being honest . Honest about what they wanted, what they believed in. Honest about the problems they were facing within their families, friend groups, workplaces, towns, and society overall.

That honesty, he noticed, had the potential to make the ground shift. It created a capacity for change. But he also knew that it likely wouldn’t last, because the most powerful forces running our world would not allow it to. They wanted control over our clicks, our conversations, our dollars, our work, our votes—our lives . The only way that we could beat those systems, would be to resist the calls to keep moving, and to “go back to normal.� In order to change, we had to unsubscribe.

Now, in Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! , Gambuto gives us a radical blueprint for the ways we can take a deep breath, renew and commit to a life that we really want, individually and collectively, from unsubscribing to emails and automated subscriptions to reevaluating the presence of people and ideas and habits that no longer serve us or make us happy. Infused with the practical advice in James Clear’s Atomic Habits and the humor of Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k , Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! helps us focus on where we find joy in our lives and encourages us to toss out what doesn’t bring us joy in this modern world.]]>
336 Julio Vincent Gambuto 1668009544 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.48 2023 Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit
author: Julio Vincent Gambuto
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Someone You Can Build a Nest In]]> 182506390 Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.]]>
310 John Wiswell 0756418852 Jennifer 3 3.97 2024 Someone You Can Build a Nest In
author: John Wiswell
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves:
review:

]]>
Open Book 41571753 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

Jessica tells of growing up in 1980s Texas where she was sexually abused by the daughter of a family friend, and of unsuccessfully auditioning for the Mickey Mouse Club at age 13 with Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling before going on to sign a record deal with Columbia and marrying 98 Degrees member Nick Lachey.

Along the way, she details the struggles in her life, such as the pressure to support her family as a teenager, divorcing Lachey, enduring what she describes as an emotionally abusive relationship with musician John Mayer, being body-shamed in an overly appearance-centered industry, and going through bouts of heavy drinking. But Simpson ends on a positive note, discussing her billion-dollar apparel line and marriage with professional football star Eric Johnson, with whom she has three children.]]>
416 Jessica Simpson Jennifer 4 4.08 2020 Open Book
author: Jessica Simpson
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/06
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]>
Picnic in the Ruins 55303672 A madcap caper across the RV-strewn vacation lands of southern Utah meets a meditation on mythology, authenticity, the ethics of preservation, and one nagging question: "who owns the past?"

Anthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remote national monument on the Utah-Arizona border when she unexpectedly crosses paths with two small-time criminals. The Ashdown brothers were hired to steal maps from a "collector" of Native American artifacts, but instead of delivering as promised, the brothers are out to strike it rich.

But their ineptitude has alerted the local sheriff to their presence--and forced their employer, a former lobbyist seeking lucrative monument land that may soon be open to energy exploration, to send a fixer to clean up their mess before it upsets her machinations. Sheriff Dalton, following the Ashdowns' trail, soon discovers he's not dealing with a simple burglary--and any hope the sheriff had for peace and quiet is long gone.]]>
336 Todd Robert Petersen 1640093222 Jennifer 3 3.52 2021 Picnic in the Ruins
author: Todd Robert Petersen
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In]]> 123921296
One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned generation.

Kate is a pop culture commentator and host of the popular millennial-focused podcast Be There in Five . Part-funny, part-serious, Kate navigates the complicated nature of celebrating and criticizing the culture that shaped her as a woman, while arguing that great depths can come from surface-level interests.

With her trademark style and vulnerability, One In a Millennial is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.]]>
328 Kate Kennedy 1250285127 Jennifer 4 3.73 2024 One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
author: Kate Kennedy
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves:
review:

]]>
The Women 127305853 De la autora superventas de El Ruiseñor , una historia de mujeres valientes decididas a arriesgar su vida por los demás en uno de los momentos más peligrosos de la historia.

Inspiradas por el coraje. Ligadas por la amistad. Unidas por la esperanza.

«Las mujeres pueden ser heroínas». Cuando Frankie McGrath, estudiante de enfermería de veinte años, oye por primera vez estas inesperadas palabras, siente una revelación. Criada en el idílico y soleado sur de California y protegida por sus conservadores padres, siempre se ha enorgullecido de hacer lo que se espera de ella, de ser una buena chica. Pero en 1966 el mundo está cambiando y, de repente, su vida parece abrirse a nuevas posibilidades. Cuando su hermano parte para combatir en Vietnam, ella se une de manera impulsiva al Cuerpo de Enfermeras del Ejército para seguirle.

Allí, Frankie se siente igual de inmadura e inexperta que los jóvenes enviados para luchar, y se ve abrumada por el caos y la destrucción de la guerra. Además, un trauma inesperado la golpea al volver a casa, el de encontrar un país cambiado y dividido, un país que quiere olvidar. Frankie descubrirá el verdadero valor de la amistad y el dolor que puede causar un corazón roto.

***Número 1 en las listas de best sellers de The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, la Asociación de Librerías Independientes, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, Audible y Los Angeles Daily News***

Sobre la novela han
«De nuevo, Hannah ilumina con su luz a mujeres que la historia ha ignorado».
People Magazine

«Hannah está en su mejor momento en esta novela».
The New York Times

«Conmovedora y excepcionalmente documentada».
Stephen King

«ʴǻDz».
Matt Haig, autor de La biblioteca de la medianoche

«Kristin Hannah, una de las mejores narradoras de nuestro tiempo, aborda una de las más crueles y viles guerras del último Vietnam. Las mujeres de la guerra revela la enorme contribución y los horribles sacrificios de las enfermeras militares que sirvieron en ella... Nunca una novela de guerra se ha metamorfoseado tan profundamente en una historia sobre el corazón humano».
Delia Owen, autora de La chica salvaje

«Este libro es ficción histórica en su mejor versión. Tan conmovedor, tan desgarrador, y, sin embargo, en última instancia, optimista. ¡Bravo!».
Nicholas D. Kristof, ganador del Premio Pulitzer y coautor de La mitad del cielo

«Deslumbra con su sacrificio; y eleva el ánimo con su heroísmo... Un importante y largamente esperado tributo a las valientes enfermeras que sirvieron en Vietnam».
Bonnie Garmus, autora de Lecciones de química

«Los fans de los libros históricos protagonizados por mujeres van a disfrutar esta magnética novela».
Publishers Weekly

Please This audiobook is in Spanish.]]>
471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Jennifer 3 4.58 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life]]> 145102
how a baby's brain is "assembled" from scratch
the critical prenatal factors that shapebrain development
how the birthing process itself affects the brain
which forms of stimulation are most effective at promoting cognitive development
how boys' and girls' brains develop differently
how nutrition, stress, and other physical and social factors can permanently affect a child's brain


Brilliantly blending cutting-edge science with a mother's wisdom and insight, What's Going On in There? is an invaluable contribution to the nature versus nurture debate. Children's development is determined both by the genes they are born with and the richness of their early environment. This timely and important book shows parents the innumerable ways in which they can actually help their children grow better brains.]]>
544 Lise Eliot 0553378252 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.09 1999 What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
author: Lise Eliot
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>