en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:30:12 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 61774690
Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and '80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson¡¯s Neuromancer and Ling Ma¡¯s Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters ¡ªBo, Brandon and Blue¡ª who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.

* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.

* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.

* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television expos¨¦ of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.

Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?]]> 341 Jinwoo Chong 1685890342 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.33 2023
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 60679392
Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.]]> 352 Marisa Crane 164622129X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.89 2023
author: Marisa Crane
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: 2025-tbr
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]]> 765618 256 Abdulrazak Gurnah Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.63 1994
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 8867135
Karen Armstrong believes that while compassion is intrinsic in all human beings, each of us needs to work diligently to cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion. Here, in this straightforward, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life.

The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with ¡°Learn About Compassion¡± and close with ¡°Love Your Enemies.¡± In between, she takes up ¡°compassion for yourself,¡± mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and ¡°concern for everybody.¡± She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to ¡°hear one another¡¯s narratives.¡± Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 6 Karen Armstrong 0307881741 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.79 2010
author: Karen Armstrong
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 223889073 An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had ¡°a rough few years.¡± She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood¡ªmisunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe¡ªand the question of legacy, or, as she put it, ¡°what it¡¯s been worth.¡± The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion¡¯s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers¡ªquestioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0593803671 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.50
author: Joan Didion
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world¡¯s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry¡¯s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.55 2025
author: John Green
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: 2025-tbr
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]]> 211004176 Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.

¡°Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.¡±

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

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

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters¡¯ bond but also their lives will be at risk¡­]]> 133 Amal El-Mohtar 1250341086 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.21 2025
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: 2025-tbr
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]]> 51582376 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church¡¯s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher¡¯s wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta¡¯s ¡°same time next year¡± arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.]]> 217 Deesha Philyaw 1949199738 Chanpheng 0 ebooks 4.16 2020
author: Deesha Philyaw
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 216971219 A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up¡ªand never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy¡ªand what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .]]> 400 Chuck Wendig 0593156560 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.89 2025
author: Chuck Wendig
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 217453585 An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for¡ªtwo of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

¡°An astonishing work of art¡­This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake.¡± ¡ªRachel Khong, author of Real Americans

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape¡ªbut as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.

Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she¡¯d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo¡¯s own, she¡¯s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia¡¯s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who¡¯s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.]]> 320 Susanna Kwan 0593701402 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.98 2025
author: Susanna Kwan
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 214151232 A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings¡ªtwo human, one robot¡ªas they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he¡¯s unlike anything she¡¯s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun¡¯s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.]]> 391 Silvia Park 1668021668 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.95 2025
author: Silvia Park
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: 2025-tbr
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]]> 19549841 Librarian Note: Alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780375866562.

In her New York Times bestselling and Morris Award-winning debut, Rachel Hartman introduces mathematical dragons in an alternative-medieval world to fantasy and science-fiction readers of all ages.

Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered¡ªin suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.]]> 499 Rachel Hartman Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.91 2012
author: Rachel Hartman
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. ¡°Forget about daily life,¡± chides her grandmother on the phone. ¡°We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.¡± Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 Ayseg¨¹l Savas 163973306X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.88 2024
author: Ayseg¨¹l Savas
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 60006489 Now experience where the hit movie from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson, started in Mickey7 (the inspiration for the film Mickey 17).

Dying isn¡¯t any fun¡­but at least it¡¯s a living.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there¡¯s a mission that¡¯s too dangerous¡ªeven suicidal¡ªthe crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal¡­and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, Mickey7¡¯s fate has been sealed. There¡¯s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they will likely be thrown into the recycler for protein.

Mickey7 must keep his double a secret from the rest of the colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.]]> 288 Edward Ashton Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.06 2022
author: Edward Ashton
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 6186292
Or so the hospital informs her when Mrs Shapiro has an accident and names Georgie next of kin. This, however, is not a case of a quick ward visit: Mrs Shapiro has a large rickety house full of stinky cats whtat needs looking after and that a pair of estate agents seem intent on swindling from her. Plus there are the "Uselesses" trying to repair it (uselessly). Then there's the social workrer who wants to put her in a nursing home. Not to mention some letters that point to a mysterious, painful past.

As Georgie tries her best to put Mrs Shapiro's life back together, somehow she must stop her own from falling apart...]]> 419 Marina Lewycka 1905490224 Chanpheng 5 regular-books 3.52 2009
author: Marina Lewycka
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: regular-books
review:
This is an enjoyable book, and brings up how people wo have been through such traumatic circumstances can still continue their lives and shake up those close to them. The main character, Georgina, becomes close to Mrs. Shapiro and a strange cast of Jews and Palestinians. She wants to learn more about their lives, and she ties up some mysteries in the final third of the book, which reveals some traumatic stories with this community of friends. It speaks to the resilience of the people that they can somehow make a meaning out of their lives. And when she learns their stories, se understands the deeper connection between them, and how they have grown in this connection - Palestinian and Jew, a woman taking on a diseased woman's identity and husband
]]> 60147395
There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse.
What will be the spark that lights the conflagration?
Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood ¨C that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.

Ilmar, some say, is the worst place in the world and the gateway to a thousand worse places.

Ilmar,
City of Long Shadows.
City of Bad Decisions.
City of Last Chances.]]> 500 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1801108420 Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 3.84 2022
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: audiobooks
review:
It's an interesting concept - of somehow, a portal from elsewhere ends up on Earth. But some parts are too gruesome and some just too confusing that I just rushed through it.
]]> 7146335
Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?

Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?

Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy¡¯s rival in love?

Or could "the Automator", the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school, have something to hide?

Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner¡± Flynn to basketball-playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.]]> 661 Paul Murray 0241141826 Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 3.78 2010
author: Paul Murray
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 18114449 The Hakawati, with a heartrending novel that celebrates the singular life of an obsessive introvert, revealing Beirut¡¯s beauties and horrors along the way.

Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, divorced, and childless, Aaliya is her family¡¯s "unnecessary appendage.¡± Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated have never been read¡ªby anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, "the three witches,¡± discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya accidentally dyes her hair too blue.

In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman¡¯s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya¡¯s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Insightful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya¡¯s volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of a single woman's reclusive life in the Middle East.]]> 291 Rabih Alameddine 0802122140 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.81 2013
author: Rabih Alameddine
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 171222486 0 A.J. Hartley Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.33 2011
author: A.J. Hartley
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 128717502
On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants.

To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations.

The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on.

Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots--unthinkable under the laws of Robotics--or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence!]]> Isaac Asimov Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 4.50
author: Isaac Asimov
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 30016
Reacting in fear of the technological superiority of the Outer Worlds, the people of Earth have hidden themselves in vast underground cities, nursing a hatred for Spacers. The fifty Outer Worlds of the Spacers together are home to fewer people than planet Earth. And home to many, many more robots. Earthmen hate Spacer robots, too...

But Baley doesn't. He once had a robot partner, R. Daneel ¨C and when the authorities of the planet Solaria request terrestrial assistance in investigating a murder, Baley is once again teamed with Daneel. He is the first Earthmen in a millennium to travel to the Outer Worlds... and he must endure the glare of a sun far more deadly than Earth's.]]> 204 Isaac Asimov Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 4.17 1958
author: Isaac Asimov
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: audiobooks
review:
I read this ten years ago, and many years ago when I was a child. It's not the greatest exploration about personalities but does bring up the reactions to progress - living inside like in a bee hive, or in more open lands but afraid of human contact and emotions and being served by robot slaves. I might have to go back to read the first book, Caves of Steel, again.
]]> 5427609
Roushana Maitland has known great fame and great sorrow throughout her long life. As a world-renowned musician, she was the queen of the Paris bohemians even as nuclear war raged elsewhere around the globe. She lost a beloved brother in a terrorist-created biological nightmare. She sometimes relished, sometimes endured her marriage to a brilliant and unpredictable conductor. Now, she lives out her days on the rugged Cornish coast, remembering past glories and heartbreaks. She struggles with the decision to let her life slip away, or choose a virtual existence for eternity, as so many of her friends and acquaintances have already done.

Then, one day, she discovers a naked young man who has washed up on the beach. She brings him home, dresses him in her husband¡¯s clothes, and calls him ¡°Adam.¡± As this strange arrival convalesces, Roushana shares her stories and her secrets, recounting the personal landmarks in a remarkable life lived in a world gone mad, even as his own past remains a mystery.]]> 302 Ian R. MacLeod 1906301212 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.72 2008
author: Ian R. MacLeod
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 4.06 2025
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 19706906 "A wily thriller-fantasy . . . Each discovery sounds like the voice of a storyteller reminding us of how the gods play with our fates."¡ªNew York Times

Winner of the Finlandia Award, A Love Story is an enchanting novel that has become an international sensation. Angel, a young photographer, comes home from a night of carousing to find a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a wounded, helpless young troll. He takes it in, not suspecting the dramatic consequences of this decision. What does one do with a troll in the city? As the troll's presence influences Angel's life in ways he could never have predicted, it becomes clear that the creature is the familiar of man's most forbidden feelings. A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, beguiling story of nature and man's relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves.]]> 292 Johanna Sinisalo 1555847374 Chanpheng 0 currently-reading 3.78 2000
author: Johanna Sinisalo
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 223959699
When their best friend Josh proposes a daring climb of Alaska¡¯s perilous summit, aspiring writer Finn (Jack Falahee, How to Get Away with Murder) sees it as his ticket to literary success, and local lifer Doug (Jake Lacy, The White Lotus) signs up for the challenge. But as the trio ascends into the deadly "Death Zone," long-buried secrets and rivalries emerge, threatening to tear them apart before the mountain does.

Told through a masterful blend of present-day scenes, excerpts from Finn¡¯s now best-selling memoir, and their pulse-pounding ascent, Denali keeps listeners on edge, slowly revealing the mystery of what really happened on that fateful expedition. As Abby (Amrit Kaur, Sex Lives of College Girls), Josh¡¯s sister, pieces together conflicting accounts years later, she¡¯s forced to confront unsettling questions about the brother she thought she knew¡ªand the man she's chosen to love.

Denali explores the complex bonds of friendship, the seductive power of fame, and the psychological toll of surviving when others do not.]]> Austin Bunn Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 2.85 2025
author: Austin Bunn
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 2.85
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 131101
All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.

Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese "salaryman" who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation -- and misunderstanding -- and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.]]> 352 Pico Iyer 0679738347 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.78 1991
author: Pico Iyer
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 211399655 From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat

Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He¡¯s not a Christian¡ªor a member of any religious group¡ªbut his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It¡¯s not just freedom from distraction and noise and it¡¯s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.

In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider¡¯s view of monastic life¡ªand of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there¡¯s a space for quiet and recollection that¡¯s open to us all.

Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.]]> 234 Pico Iyer 0593420306 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.86
author: Pico Iyer
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 19660

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 408 Rohinton Mistry 0771061315 Chanpheng 5 3.97 1991
author: Rohinton Mistry
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves:
review:
All his books are gems, and this is wonderful.
]]> 50246
Alternate cover is available here.]]> 329 Daphne du Maurier Chanpheng 4 3.85 1969
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2013/02/03
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world¡ªa mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he¡¯s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature¡¯s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 3.73 2023
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: audiobooks
review:
I liked parts of the book, but it wandered and repeated text too much.
]]> 19661
Nariman must now turn to his younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad, and their two sons, who share a small, crowded home. Their decision will test not only their material resources but, in surprising ways, all their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith. Sweeping and intimate, tragic and mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous emotional power.]]> 434 Rohinton Mistry 037570342X Chanpheng 5 On re-reading it, it is just as wonderful as the first time, though I pick out more details and I know more about Indian history and politics. ]]> 4.03 2002
author: Rohinton Mistry
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves:
review:
While going through my library in Xieng Khouang, I found the physical book again and decided to re-read it. I loved it the first time, 7 years ago.
On re-reading it, it is just as wonderful as the first time, though I pick out more details and I know more about Indian history and politics.
]]> 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the ¡°Transition.¡± Now, eating human meat¡ª¡°special meat¡±¡ªis legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he¡¯s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he¡¯s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost¡ªand what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Chanpheng 1 3.76 2017
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:
This book is kinda gruesome. I'm not sure if I will finish it. I often listen to audiobooks before I go to sleep but I think this book might give me nightmares.
]]> 33917 Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail ¡ª the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase ¡ª that opens whole worlds of emotion.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.]]> 304 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618485228 Chanpheng 5 ebooks 4.01 2003
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 219436442
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 23 Stephen Graham Jones 1250359740 Chanpheng 2 ebooks 3.60 2024
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 125077431
In ¡°The Boundary,¡± one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker¡¯s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family¡¯s immigrant past. In ¡°P¡¯s Parties,¡± a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend¡¯s yearly birthday gathering¡ªuntil the husband crosses a line. And in ¡°The Steps,¡± on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy¡¯s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri¡¯s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.]]> 224 Jhumpa Lahiri Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.77 2023
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: audiobooks
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]]> 209439468 In this new standalone, Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo introduces a beguiling fantasy city in the tradition of Calvino, Mieville, and Le Guin.

A demon. An angel. A city that burns at the heart of the world.

The demon Vitrine¡ªimmortal, powerful, and capricious¡ªloves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost¡ªand an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other¡¯s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to burn a world to ashes and build it anew.]]> 216 Nghi Vo 1250348277 Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 3.75 2024
author: Nghi Vo
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 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:

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¡ªfor 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¡ªand whether she believes¡ªwhat she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.54 2024
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 43719523
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.]]> 167 Tochi Onyebuchi 1250214769 Chanpheng 5 ebooks 3.72 2020
author: Tochi Onyebuchi
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 71984 Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeda's evolution. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of Bin Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.]]> 712 Steve Coll 0143034669 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.31 2004
author: Steve Coll
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 36420978 The National Book Award¨Cwinning, New York Times¨Cbestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond. ? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a ¡°brilliant¡± account of their stories (The New York Times). ? Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan¡¯s teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained¡ªif not in the first generation, then by the second or third. ? Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the ¡°Borscht Belt¡± resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is ¡°a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration¡± (Newsweek).]]> 1192 Irving Howe Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.21 1976
author: Irving Howe
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 123856312
In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy ¡°arrival,¡± and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.
??? In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son¡¯s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.]]> 312 Y-Dang Troeung 1039008763 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.53
author: Y-Dang Troeung
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 63912940 32 Catherynne M. Valente Chanpheng 5 ebooks 3.86 2022
author: Catherynne M. Valente
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 137024434
¡°The Woman Carrying a Corpse¡± was originally published as ±³Ê¬ÌåµÄÅ®ÈË in December 2019 by Flower City (»¨³Ç).]]> 6 Chi Hui Chanpheng 4 ebooks 3.00 2019
author: Chi Hui
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 17644
The first story, "The Bad News," is set in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. The narrative then switches time as the central character moves through childhood and adolescence in "The Art of Cooking and Serving," "The Headless Horseman," and "My Last Duchess." We follow her into young adulthood in "The Other Place" and then through a complex relationship, traced in four of the stories: "Monopoly," "Moral Disorder," "White Horse," and "The Entities." The last two stories, "The Labrador Fiasco" and "The Boys at the Lab," deal with the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood's celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. As the New York Times has said: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations."]]> 240 Margaret Atwood 0385503849 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.63 2006
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 210670872 A rich, deeply moving portrait of a young Korean woman in 1930s Japan who is torn between two worlds and must reclaim her true identity to provide a future for her family.

1928, Japan-occupied Korea. Eleven-year-old Miyoung has dreams too big for her tiny farming village near Pyongyang: to become a teacher, to avoid an arranged marriage, to write her own future. When she is offered the chance to live with her older sister in Japan and continue her education, she is elated, even though it means leaving her sick mother¡ªand her very name¡ªbehind.

In Kyoto, anti-Korean sentiment is rising every day, and Miyoung quickly realizes she must pass as Japanese if she expects to survive. Her Japanese name, Miyoko, helps her find a new calling as a nurse, but as the years go by, she fears that her true self is slipping away. She seeks solace in a Korean church group and, within it, finds something she never expected: a romance with an activist that reignites her sense of purpose and gives her a cherished son.

As war looms on a new front and Miyoung feels the constraints of her adopted home tighten, she is faced with a choice that will change her life¡ªand the lives of those she loves¡ªforever.]]> 321 Rosa Kwon Easton 1662519702 Chanpheng 4 4.02 2024
author: Rosa Kwon Easton
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
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]]> 34921575 Eat the Apple is a twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels. Young¡¯s story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.]]> 272 Matt Young 1632869500 Chanpheng 3 audiobooks 3.63 2018
author: Matt Young
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to?peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of?Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz ¨C just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy ¨C collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha¡¯s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert¡¯s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways?those of?other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls?that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.36 2025
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 211003894
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.

When Mercy¡¯s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it¡¯s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.]]> 272 Trang Thanh Tran 1547611111 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.63 2025
author: Trang Thanh Tran
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 215362027 A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension.

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life.

When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.

Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband's mind, probing the depths of his past in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last.

But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after now, she risks far more than her husband's life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.]]> 384 Nicholas Binge 0593852168 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.16 2025
author: Nicholas Binge
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman¡¯s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

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

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

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.69 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York¡¯s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city¡¯s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story¡ªwith danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most ¨C love and work, community and knowledge ¨C will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.58 2025
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

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

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

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

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own¡ªand risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.81 2025
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 56988057
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society¡¯s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel¡¯s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff¡ªmany of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines¡ªto offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel¡¯s walls, listening for the diplomats¡¯ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June¡¯s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn¡¯t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon¡¯s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.]]> 400 Maggie Stiefvater 0593655508 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.04 2025
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai¡¯s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong¡¯s writing ¨C formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness ¨C are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life¡¯s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.37 2025
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making¡ªa searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists¡ªthe story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until ¡ª betrayed and brokenhearted ¡ª she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka¡¯s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka¡¯s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America ¨C but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie¡¯s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.97 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job¡ªor quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn¡¯t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail¡¯s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max¡¯s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life,?Three Days in June?is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize¨Cwinning writer at the height of her powers

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.63 2025
author: Anne Tyler
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro P¨¢ramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez. To read Pedro P¨¢ramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 Chanpheng 5 ebooks 4.06 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: ebooks
review:

]]> 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

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

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

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.79 2023
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 25201 216 Sh¨±saku End¨­ 081121320X Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.96 1993
author: Sh¨±saku End¨­
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 57190576 Return to the mythical Barcelona library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in this posthumous collection of stories from the New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow of the Wind and The Labyrinth of the Spirits.

Bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zaf¨®n conceived of this collection of stories as an appreciation to the countless readers who joined him on the extraordinary journey that began with The Shadow of the Wind. Comprising eleven stories, most of them never before published in English, The City of Mist offers the reader compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

The stories are mysterious, imbued with a sense of menace, and told with the warmth, wit, and humor of Zaf¨®n's inimitable voice. A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his creative gifts capture the attentions of an aloof young beauty who has stolen his heart. A labyrinth maker flees Constantinople to a plague-ridden Barcelona, with plans for building a library impervious to the destruction of time. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book like no other, each page of which could prolong the life of the woman he loves. And a brilliant Catalan architect named Antoni Gaud¨ª reluctantly agrees to cross the ocean to New York, a voyage that will determine the fate of an unfinished masterpiece.

Imaginative and beguiling, these and other stories in The City of Mist summon up the mesmerizing magic of their brilliant creator and invite us to come dream along with him.

Blanca and the departure
Nameless
A young lady from Barcelona
Rose of fire
The prince of Parnassus
a Christmas tale
Alicia, at dawn
Men in grey
Kiss
Gaud¨ª in Manhattan
Two-minute apocalypse]]> 162 Carlos Ruiz Zaf¨®n 0063118092 Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.95 2020
author: Carlos Ruiz Zaf¨®n
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 51964497
A spellbinding work of literature, Latitudes of Longing follows the interconnected lives of characters searching for true intimacy. The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself.

A young writer awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in India for this novel, Shubhangi Swarup is a storyteller of extraordinary talent and insight. Richly imaginative and wryly perceptive, Latitudes of Longing offers a soaring view of humanity: our beauty and ugliness, our capacity to harm and love each other, and our mysterious and sacred relationship with nature.]]> 320 Shubhangi Swarup 0593132556 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 3.74 2018
author: Shubhangi Swarup
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: audiobooks
review:
Now this is the best book I've read - listened to - this year. That previous sentence was 4 years ago. Now I decided to re-read it; it's quite amazing
]]> 112974860 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives¡ªfrom the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain

As David Brooks observes, ¡°There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen¡ªto accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.¡±

And yet we humans don¡¯t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person¡¯s story should you pay attention to?

Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.]]> 304 David Brooks 059323006X Chanpheng 0 currently-reading, audiobooks 4.09 2023
author: David Brooks
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: currently-reading, audiobooks
review:

]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar¡¯s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning¡ªin faith, art, ourselves, others¡ªin which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Chanpheng 5 audiobooks 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> 10962765 Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons returns with a dazzling new novel of suspense and love set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s.

Charles Frazier puts his remarkable gifts in the service of a lean, taut narrative while losing none of the transcendent prose, virtuosic storytelling, and insight into human nature that have made him one of the most beloved and celebrated authors in the world. Now, with his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister's troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine.

Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways.

Charles Frazier is known for his historical literary odysseys, and for making figures in the past come vividly to life. Set in the twentieth century, Nightwoods resonates with the timelessness of a great work of art.]]> 272 Charles Frazier 140006709X Chanpheng 4 audiobooks 3.61 2011
author: Charles Frazier
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: audiobooks
review:
The way he writes is so evocative. I could see the woods, the trees and the people in this culture. I still didn't like the thriller aspect - why does a book have to include violence in order to be read and noticed? But I did love the writing. Even with the blood and dirty bandages.
]]> 61609871 From the New York Times bestselling author of Cold Mountain and Varina, a stunning new novel that paints a vivid portrait of life in the Great Depression

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he's landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office.

A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band. Long holds shady political aspirations, but was once a WWI sniper--and his right hand is a mysterious elder cowboy, a vestige of the violent old west. Val quickly finds himself entranced by their lives.

One day, Eve flees home with a valuable painting in tow, and Long recruits Val to hit the road with a mission of tracking her down. Journeying from ramshackle Hoovervilles to San Francisco nightclubs to the swamps of Florida, Val's search for Eve narrows, and he soon turns up secrets that could spark formidable changes for all of them.

In The Trackers, singular American writer Charles Frazier conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history that bears uncanny resemblance to our own. With the keen perceptions of humanity and transcendent storytelling that have made him beloved for decades, Frazier has created a powerful and timeless new classic.]]> 320 Charles Frazier 0062948083 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.57 2023
author: Charles Frazier
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 127281143
At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near¡ªonce someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant¡¯s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.]]> 160 Premee Mohamed 1250881781 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.87 2024
author: Premee Mohamed
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 205435919 NTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER!

From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who¡¯s seen too much and a family at a breaking point

A young girl has died and the family¡¯s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl¡¯s death.

Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the se?or and se?ora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: ¡°smart appearance, full time,¡± their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the se?or gave the se?ora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter¡¯s rebellion as she grew up, the mother¡¯s coldness, the father¡¯s distance. She saw it all.

After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.]]> 272 Alia Trabucco Zer¨¢n 0593850513 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.56 2022
author: Alia Trabucco Zer¨¢n
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 51152434
A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.

In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.]]> 210 Sigrid Nunez 0593191412 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.73 2020
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 53825991
¡°There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those¡ªthe year isn¡¯t half-way done. What I¡¯ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.¡±

Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love¡ªan essential book in extraordinary times.]]> 97 Zadie Smith 059329761X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.99 2020
author: Zadie Smith
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 138378632
A collection of entrancing literary fables from an underrated master of the form ¡­

Perfect for the fans of David Mitchell, Julio Cort¨¢zar and Steven Barthelme are these 15 dreamlike tales.

Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness ¡ª the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.


In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.

¡°Every madness is logical to its owner,¡± one of Rose¡¯s characters says. And it is that line ¡ª between logic and madness ¡ª that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.]]> 224 C.D. Rose 1685890849 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.69
author: C.D. Rose
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they¡¯ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story¡ªabout art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.55 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience¡ªbut still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in¡ªfunny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.57 2020
author: Jenny Offill
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 60165418 Dinosaurs is both sharp-edged and tender, an emotionally moving, intellectually resonant novel that asks, In the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?]]> 230 Lydia Millet 1324021462 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.85 2022
author: Lydia Millet
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

]]> 195791305
¡°What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?¡±

Since humanity discovered the existence of pocket worlds, academics have embarked on exploratory missions as agents for the Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Portal Worlds to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon.

Archeologist Raquel and her biologist wife Marlena once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe¡¯s mysteries. Now, forty years in the future, Raquel is a disgraced ex-agent, pocket worlds are controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, and Marlena now lives in a pocket universe Raquel wears around her neck in which time passes faster than on Earth, and no longer speaks to her.

Standing in the ruins of her dream and her calling, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself, to her wife and her own failed ideals and confront what it means to save something¨Dor someone¨Dfrom time.]]> 208 Brenda Peynado 1250854318 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.53 2024
author: Brenda Peynado
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 195820829 ?
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn¡¯t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories¡ªliterally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
?
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma¡¯s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
?
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
?
Readers of Isabel Allende¡¯s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver¡¯s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez¡¯s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.]]> 243 Julia Alvarez 1643753843 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.64 2024
author: Julia Alvarez
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 30316130 ]]> 413 Saad Z. Hossain 1944700064 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.68 2017
author: Saad Z. Hossain
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 43459662
Melek Ahmar, decidido a conquistar la ciudad y la gloria, tan solo contar¨¢ con la ayuda de un antiguo soldado gurja adicto a los pistachos, y ReGi, una djinn adolescente que tiene un pr¨®spero negocio en el Jard¨ªn de los Sue?os.

Este extra?o tr¨ªo de inadaptados se internar¨¢ en el coraz¨®n de Katmand¨², desenterrando los oscuros secretos sobre los que se construy¨® el para¨ªso.]]> 167 Saad Z. Hossain 1250209110 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.04 2019
author: Saad Z. Hossain
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 57642699
So the mercenary Djibrel has to carry a machete wherever he goes. Only a swift beheading can ensure the job gets done anymore. Djibrel navigates the crowded streets, humans teeming with genetic mutations, looking for answers about what happened to the Djinn, a magical super race of genies who seem to have disappeared, or merged, with humans for survival. What Djibrel doesn't know is that his every move is being tracked by the infamous Cyber Mage¡ªbetter known to his parents as Murzak, a privileged snarky teenager who regularly works for a Russian crime syndicate with a band of elite hackers, like his best friend ReGi, who resides in North Africa's FEZ (Free Economic Zone). Respected and feared online, Murzak is about to embark on one of his biggest challenges: attending high school IRL. But when he discovers a brand new type of AI, operating on a dark web from the abandoned Kingdom of Bahrain that he thought was just an urban myth, Murzak and Djibrel will have to face the unimaginable in an already inconceivable world.

In this laugh-out-loud-funny and totally original new novel, Saad Z. Hossain continues his signature genre mashup of SF and fantasy, challenging and subverting everything previously imagined about our future and climate change. A scathing critique of corporate greed, Hossain shows us how to think beyond the na?ve ideas of preening moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.]]> 341 Saad Z. Hossain 1951213289 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.87 2021
author: Saad Z. Hossain
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 328504 259 Nuruddin Farah 0140296433 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.79 1986
author: Nuruddin Farah
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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]]> 20613611
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.

Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend from years ago when they were both teachers. Kaga joined the police force while Nonoguchi became a writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. When Kaga suspects something is a little bit off with Nonoguchi's statement, he investigates further, searching Nonoguchi's apartment. There he finds evidence that shows that the two writers' relationship was very different than the two claimed...

In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the writer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. Which one of the two writers was ultimately guilty of malice?]]> 288 Keigo Higashino 1250035600 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.02 1996
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> 25614298
In Other Words is at heart a love story¡ªof a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. And although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery had always eluded her. So in 2012, seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for ¡°a trial by fire, a sort of baptism¡± into a new language and world.

In Rome, Lahiri began to read, and to write¡ªinitially in her journal¡ªsolely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, it is a book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Nabokov. A startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.]]> 233 Jhumpa Lahiri 1101875550 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.74 2015
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 195443798
On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It¡¯s the greatest discovery in humanity¡¯s spacefaring history ¨C yet who were its builders and where did they go?

Professor Arton Daghdev had always wanted to study alien life up close. Then his wishes become a reality in the worst way. His political activism sees him exiled from Earth to Kiln¡¯s extrasolar labour camp. There, he¡¯s condemned to work under an alien sky until he dies.

Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem like nothing seen on Earth. The monstrous alien life interacts in surprising, sometimes shocking ways with the human body, so Arton will risk death on a daily basis. However, the camp¡¯s oppressive regime might just kill him first. If Arton can somehow escape both fates, the world of Kiln holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it, and might just set him free . . .]]> 396 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1035013770 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.99 2024
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 8915857 Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they¡¯ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona¡¯s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other¡¯s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson¡¯s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.]]> 100 Tove Jansson 1590173783 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.99 1989
author: Tove Jansson
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> 42268742 The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: ¡°I shot him between the eyes.¡± As the tale¡ªa plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness¡ªproceeds, the narrator¡¯s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg¡¯s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don¡¯t more wives kill their husbands?]]> 88 Natalia Ginzburg 0811228789 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.98 1947
author: Natalia Ginzburg
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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]]> 203578730 Her beauty hides a deadly purpose.

Xishi¡¯s beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue¡ªconvinced that the best fate for a girl is to marry well and support her family. When Xishi draws the attention of the famous young military advisor, Fanli, he presents her with a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon. One that could topple the rival neighboring kingdom of Wu, improve the lives of her people, and avenge her sister¡¯s murder. All she has to do is infiltrate the enemy palace as a spy, seduce their immoral king, and weaken them from within.

Trained by Fanli in everything from classical instruments to concealing emotion, Xishi hones her beauty into the perfect blade. But she knows Fanli can see through every deception she masters, the attraction between them burning away any falsehoods.

Once inside the enemy palace, Xishi finds herself under the hungry gaze of the king¡¯s advisors while the king himself shows her great affection. Despite his gentleness, a brutality lurks and Xishi knows she can never let her guard down. But the higher Xishi climbs in the Wu court, the farther she and Fanli have to fall¡ªand if she is unmasked as a traitor, she will bring both kingdoms down.]]> 325 Ann Liang 1250289467 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.84 2024
author: Ann Liang
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 202470599 Part science fiction, part fantasy, and entirely infused with West African culture and spirituality, this novella offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a teenager whose coming of age will herald a new age for her world. Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, this is the first in the She Who Knows trilogy

When there is a call, there is often a response.

Najeeba knows.

She has had The Call. But how can a 13-year-old girl have the Call? Only men and boys experience the annual call to the Salt Roads. What¡¯s just happened to Najeeba has never happened in the history of her village. But it¡¯s not a terrible thing, just strange. So when she leaves with her father and brothers to mine salt at the Dead Lake, there¡¯s neither fanfare nor protest. For Najeeba, it¡¯s a dream come true: travel by camel, open skies, and a chance to see a spectacular place she¡¯s only heard about. However, there must have been something to the rule, because Najeeba¡¯s presence on the road changes everything and her family will never be the same.

Small, intimate, up close, and deceptively quiet, this is the beginning of the Kponyungo Sorceress.]]> 161 Nnedi Okorafor 075641895X Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.00 2024
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 66092863 Tense, subtly disturbing Japanese literary horror perfect for fans of The Memory Police, Tender is the Flesh, Fever Dream, and The Vegetarian.

Paired with two stories of creeping tension and unsettled minds, the unnerving title novella Nails and Eyes introduces a unique new voice in Japanese literature.

With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes¡ªappearing in English for the first time¡ªbuilds to a conclusion of uncanny power.

A young girl addresses her stepmother, who has moved in shortly after her mother¡¯s death in unusual circumstances. The girl shows strangely detailed knowledge of the older woman¡¯s life, and as her stepmother settles into the house, the girl¡¯s obsession sharpens to an ever finer point.]]> 138 Kaori Fujino 1782279547 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.39 2013
author: Kaori Fujino
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 63934847 Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels¡ªthe inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may¡ªor may not¡ªhave spoken to him.

A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.]]> 212 Kate Atkinson 0385688237 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.67 2023
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

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

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro P¨¢ramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.76 2023
author: Justin Torres
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 101145361
From the beloved award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a spectacular collection of unique stories, each confronting themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family.

The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

Lauded as a ¡°quotidian - surreal craft - master¡± ( New York magazine), Yoon¡¯s stunning stories are laced with beauty and cruelty, and The Hive and the Honey is the work of an author writing at the very height of his powers.]]> 160 Paul Yoon 1668020793 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.73 2023
author: Paul Yoon
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 62919865
In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.

In ¡°Due North,¡± an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she¡¯s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In ¡°Who¡¯s Down?¡± a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In ¡°Candy for Hanif¡± a mother¡¯s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In ¡°Woman in Niqab,¡± a daughter¡¯s suspicion of her father¡¯s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In ¡°New Mexico,¡± a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home.

With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it¡¯s the errors that make us human.]]> 256 Aaliyah Bilal 1982191813 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.71 2023
author: Aaliyah Bilal
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 96178193
In Dearborn, a father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS and hide their cash earnings inside of frozen chickens. Tensions heighten within a close-knit group of couples when a mysterious man begins to frequent the local gym pool, dressed in Speedos printed with nostalgic images of Lebanon. And a failed stage actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man with ambitions of becoming a Hollywood action hero to LA, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have other plans.

By turns wildly funny, incisive, and deeply moving, Dearborn introduces readers to an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction and invites us all to consider what it means to be part of a place and community, and how it is that we help one another survive.]]> 240 Ghassan Zeineddine 1959030299 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.21 2023
author: Ghassan Zeineddine
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino¡¯s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino¡¯s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.08 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 173476065 When any biological matter can be used to create life, stolen celebrity DNA sells to the highest bidder¡ªor the craziest stalker¡ªin this propulsive thriller.

With a vivid imagining of the future, _Gattaca _meets Black Mirror in Kira Peikoff¡¯s Baby X.

In the near-future United States, where advanced technology can create eggs or sperm from any person¡¯s cells, celebrities face the alarming potential of meeting biological children they never conceived. Famous singer Trace Thorne is tired of being targeted by the Vault, a black market site devoted to stealing DNA. Sick of paying ransom money for his own cell matter, he hires bio-security guard Ember Ryan to ensure his biological safety.

Ember will do anything she can to protect her clients. She knows all the Vault¡¯s tricks¡ªdiscarded tissues, used straws, lipstick tubes¡ªand has prevented countless DNA thefts. Working for Thorne, her focus becomes split when she begins to fall for him, but she knows she hasn¡¯t let anything slip¡ªlove or not, his DNA is safe. But then she and Thorne are confronted by a pregnant woman, Quinn, who claims that Thorne is the father of her baby, and all bets are off.

Brilliantly plotted and terrifyingly prescient, Baby X is an unpredictable and relentless speculative thriller perfect for fans of Blake Crouch and John Marrs.]]> 326 Kira Peikoff 1639106332 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.82 2024
author: Kira Peikoff
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 30297153
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From early childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes of giving her a better life; that forever feeling slightly out of place was simply her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up¡ªfacing prejudice her adoptive family couldn¡¯t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from¡ªshe wondered if the story she¡¯d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets¡ªvital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography / Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award / Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, TIME, Newsday, Library Journal, BuzzFeed, Real Simple, Paste Magazine, Chicago Public Library, Seattle Public Library, Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, Shelf Awareness, Electric Literature, and more]]> 240 Nicole Chung 1936787970 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.84 2018
author: Nicole Chung
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 61884985
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.]]> 356 Vajra Chandrasekera 1250847389 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.64 2023
author: Vajra Chandrasekera
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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shelves: 2025-tbr
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]]> 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee¡¯s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother¡¯s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility¡ªthe mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.56 2023
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 57895732 Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature

A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021This evocative memoir of food and family history is "somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history" (Shelf Awareness).Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details--language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.

Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother's schizophrenia. In her mother's final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent's childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother's multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her--but also the things that kept her alive.

"An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation." --Booklist (starred review)

"A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience." --Kirkus Reviews]]> 252 Grace M. Cho 1952177952 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 4.03 2021
author: Grace M. Cho
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 176450755
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she¡¯ll decide who may cross her town¡¯s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it¡¯s the same valley, the same town--except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it¡¯s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn¡¯t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he¡¯s still alive in Odile¡¯s present. Edme¨C¨Cwho is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile¨C¨Cis about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil¡¯s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.]]> 290 Scott Alexander Howard 1668015471 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.86 2024
author: Scott Alexander Howard
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

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Grieving her best friend's recent death, neuroscientist Mariana Pineda¡¯s ready to give up everything to start anew. Even her career¡ª after one last week consulting at a top secret particle accelerator.

Except the strangest thing a man stops her¡­and claims they've met before. Carter Cho knows who she is, why she's mourning, why she's there. And he needs Mariana to remember everything he¡¯s saying.

Because time is about to loop.

In a flash of energy, it¡¯s Monday morning. Again. Together, Mariana and Carter enter an inevitable life, four days at a time, over and over, without permanence except for what they share. With everything resetting¡ªeven bank accounts¡ªjoy comes in the little a delicious (and expensive) meal, a tennis match, giving a dog his favorite treat.

In some ways, those are all that matter.

But just as they figure out this new life, everything changes. Because Carter's memories of the time loop are slowly disappearing. And their only chance at happiness is breaking out of the loop¡ªforever.]]> 368 Mike Chen 0778369501 Chanpheng 0 2025-tbr 3.59 2024
author: Mike Chen
name: Chanpheng
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: 2025-tbr
review:

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