svnh's bookshelf: read en-US Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:47:47 -0700 60 svnh's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Lucy 69719 163 Jamaica Kincaid 2253153818 svnh 0 3.83 1990 Lucy
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: svnh
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading, 2025, bipoc, fiction
review:

]]> Stag Dance 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 svnh 0 to-read 4.04 2025 Stag Dance
author: Torrey Peters
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes]]> 1975989

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 209 Maya Angelou 0394750772 svnh 5 2017, bipoc 4.28 1986 All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
author: Maya Angelou
name: svnh
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2017/03/11
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2017, bipoc
review:
Hauntingly hopeful, vivid and still so tangible in ways both joyous and unjust.
]]> Between the World and Me 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 152 Ta-Nehisi Coates svnh 5 4.40 2015 Between the World and Me
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: svnh
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/30
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2019, nonfiction, the-softest-places, bipoc, memoir
review:

]]> The Marrow Thieves 34649348 234 Cherie Dimaline 1770864865 svnh 4 2020, bipoc, indigenous 3.94 2017 The Marrow Thieves
author: Cherie Dimaline
name: svnh
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/03
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, bipoc, indigenous
review:

]]> There There 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange svnh 5 2020, bipoc, indigenous 3.98 2018 There There
author: Tommy Orange
name: svnh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/20
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, bipoc, indigenous
review:

]]> Bluets 6798263 Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.]]> 112 Maggie Nelson 1933517409 svnh 4 2020, queer 4.09 2009 Bluets
author: Maggie Nelson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/10
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, queer
review:

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

Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.� With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.]]> 159 James Baldwin 1101907746 svnh 4 2020, bipoc, queer 4.36 1956 Giovanni's Room
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/15
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, bipoc, queer
review:

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

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 svnh 4 4.05 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: svnh
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/04
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, the-softest-places, queer, to-re-read, bipoc
review:

]]> The Yellow House 43347603
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.]]> 376 Sarah M. Broom 0802125085 svnh 5 2020, bipoc, new-orleans 3.88 2019 The Yellow House
author: Sarah M. Broom
name: svnh
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/28
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, bipoc, new-orleans
review:

]]> Lost Children Archive 40245130
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure--both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.]]> 385 Valeria Luiselli 0525520619 svnh 4 2020, bipoc 3.75 2019 Lost Children Archive
author: Valeria Luiselli
name: svnh
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/14
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2020, bipoc
review:

]]> Heavy 63026545
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 248 Kiese Laymon svnh 5 4.47 2018 Heavy
author: Kiese Laymon
name: svnh
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/09
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2023, memoir, nonfiction, southern, bipoc
review:

]]> How We Fight For Our Lives 43682552 From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.

“People don’t just happen,� writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I� it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.� �

Haunted and haunting, Jones’s memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

Blending poetry and prose, Jones has developed a style that is equal parts sensual, beautiful, and powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one of a kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.]]> 192 Saeed Jones 1501132733 svnh 4 4.27 2019 How We Fight For Our Lives
author: Saeed Jones
name: svnh
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/17
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2023, memoir, queer, southern, the-softest-places, bipoc
review:

]]> A Minor Chorus 60165417 A Minor Chorus introduces the dazzling literary voice of a Lambda Literary Award winner and Canadian #1 national best-selling poet to the United States, shining much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.]]> 162 Billy-Ray Belcourt 132402142X svnh 3 2023, queer, 2024, bipoc 4.03 2022 A Minor Chorus
author: Billy-Ray Belcourt
name: svnh
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2023, queer, 2024, bipoc
review:

]]> Tremor 75670841 A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,� but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.]]> 229 Teju Cole 0812997123 svnh 5 3.66 2023 Tremor
author: Teju Cole
name: svnh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2024, bipoc, fiction, to-re-read
review:
Almost unbearably poignant and simultaneously aloof; its timeli/lessness is haunting and masterfully done. I want to read it in a circle.
]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

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

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

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 svnh 5 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: svnh
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2024, memoir, nonfiction, trauma, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1939-1947)]]> 17980735 Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,� the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,� during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,� and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.

Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,� the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.]]> 440 Anaïs Nin 080401146X svnh 0 4.15 2013 Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1939-1947)
author: Anaïs Nin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: currently-reading, memoir, nonfiction, 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother]]> 29209 291 James McBride 1573225789 svnh 3 4.13 1995 The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
author: James McBride
name: svnh
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2024, 2025, memoir, nonfiction, bipoc
review:

]]> Long Division 55711746 From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.

Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City� Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.

City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance.]]> 288 Kiese Laymon 198217482X svnh 5 2025, southern, bipoc 3.82 2013 Long Division
author: Kiese Laymon
name: svnh
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025, southern, bipoc
review:

]]> City Summer, Country Summer 215806401 A lyrical picture book from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family.

On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass.

With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Alexis Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.]]> Kiese Laymon 0593405587 svnh 0 to-read, southern, bipoc 4.44 City Summer, Country Summer
author: Kiese Laymon
name: svnh
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read, southern, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984]]> 6493386 Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Againre-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.]]> 434 Simon Reynolds 1101201053 svnh 3 unfinished 4.10 2005 Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
author: Simon Reynolds
name: svnh
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: unfinished
review:

]]> The Sirens of Titan 920933 319 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0440179483 svnh 0 2015, to-read, unfinished 4.11 1959 The Sirens of Titan
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: svnh
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2015, to-read, unfinished
review:

]]> Lolita 7604 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141182537.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.]]> 368 Vladimir Nabokov 0679723161 svnh 3 3.87 1955 Lolita
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: svnh
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir]]> 150246133 New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.]]> 320 Shayla Lawson 0593472586 svnh 4 4.07 2024 How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir
author: Shayla Lawson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2024, feminist-forward, memoir, nonfiction, queer, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Is How You Lose the Time War]]> 41093489 Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.]]> 198 Amal El-Mohtar 1534431004 svnh 5 2025, fiction, queer 3.81 2019 This Is How You Lose the Time War
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: svnh
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025, fiction, queer
review:

]]> Milk Blood Heat 43893870
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth.]]> 208 Dantiel W. Moniz 0802158153 svnh 5 4.04 2021 Milk Blood Heat
author: Dantiel W. Moniz
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: 2025, the-softest-places, southern, queer, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 svnh 0 to-read 4.38 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: svnh
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Naked Lunch 563798 Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth-century fiction.]]> 232 William S. Burroughs svnh 3 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: svnh
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:

]]> The Emperor of Gladness 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 � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � 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 svnh 0 to-read, fiction, queer 4.32 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: svnh
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, fiction, queer
review:

]]> If They Come for Us 36477795
In this powerful and imaginative debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar nakedly captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in America by braiding together personal and marginalized people's histories. After being orphaned as a young girl, Asghar grapples with coming-of-age as a woman without the guidance of a mother, questions of sexuality and race, and navigating a world that put a target on her back. Asghar's poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests in our relationships with friends and family, and in our own understanding of identity. Using experimental forms and a mix of lyrical and brash language, Asghar confronts her own understanding of identity and place and belonging.]]> 106 Fatimah Asghar 052550978X svnh 4 4.24 2018 If They Come for Us
author: Fatimah Asghar
name: svnh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: 2025, india, poetry, trauma, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise]]> 200869482
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.]]> 336 Olivia Laing 0393882004 svnh 0 3.87 2024 The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
author: Olivia Laing
name: svnh
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: currently-reading, 2024, memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories]]> 1576188 The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 368 Bruno Schulz 0143105140 svnh 0 currently-reading, 2013 4.16 2005 The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
author: Bruno Schulz
name: svnh
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: currently-reading, 2013
review:

]]> The Storyteller 53931 ]]> 245 Mario Vargas Llosa 0312420285 svnh 0 to-read, fiction 3.74 1987 The Storyteller
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: svnh
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic]]> 129876 157 R.K. Narayan 0143039679 svnh 0 to-read, india 3.92 1957 The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic
author: R.K. Narayan
name: svnh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read, india
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens / Peter and Wendy]]> 38673 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living a wild and secret life with birds and fairies in the middle of London. Later Barrie let this remarkable child grow a little older and he became the boy-hero of Neverland, making his first appearance, with Wendy, Captain Hook, and the Lost Boys, in Peter and Wendy. The Peter Pan stories were Barrie's only works for children but, as their persistent popularity shows, their themes of imaginative escape continue to charm even those who long ago left Neverland. This is the first edition to include both texts in one volume and the first to a present an extensively annotated text for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.]]> 240 J.M. Barrie 0192839292 svnh 4 littleones 4.07 1906 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens / Peter and Wendy
author: J.M. Barrie
name: svnh
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1906
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: littleones
review:

]]> Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 38990 232 Alison Bechdel 0618477942 svnh 5 4.12 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
author: Alison Bechdel
name: svnh
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: 2024, better-in-ink, feminist-forward, gender, memoir, nonfiction, queer
review:

]]> All Friends Are Necessary 199344962
Efren “Chino� Flores has just moved back to the Bay Area from Seattle, jumping from sublet to sublet. In Washington, he was a beloved middle school biology teacher with a loving wife, and a child on the way until a stunning loss changed his life. Now, he’s working temp jobs, terrified of commitment, and struggling to put himself back out into the world.

But there to nurture Chino is a coterie of new and old friends and lovers who form a protective web around him. Closest to him are Metal Matt, a red-haired metalhead with a soft spot for Courtney Love and a rangy dog named Sabbath, and Mike and Kay, a couple whose literary edge is matched only by the success of their secret OnlyFans account. As Chino begins to date more men and women—and to open himself up again to love—his bonds with other people grow both rich and profound. Like a fern blooming in the wake of a forest fire, new life comes after even the most devastating upheaval.

With gorgeous, heart-rending detail and a seemingly infinite catalogue of tender, unexpected interactions, Tomas Moniz has created a striking mosaic of desire and belonging that will appeal to fans of Garth Greenwell, Jaquira Díaz, and Patricia Lockwood. An anthem to both queer and platonic love, All Friends Are Necessary evinces the wonder of friendship and the joy of giving yourself up to the essential force of community.]]> 288 Tomas Moniz 1643755811 svnh 0 to-read 3.72 All Friends Are Necessary
author: Tomas Moniz
name: svnh
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Persian Requiem 46269 279 Simin Daneshvar 080761274X svnh 0 to-read, bipoc 3.78 1969 A Persian Requiem
author: Simin Daneshvar
name: svnh
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: to-read, bipoc
review:

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

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

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 svnh 0 to-read 3.76 2023 Blackouts
author: Justin Torres
name: svnh
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Transcendent Kingdom 48570454 Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.]]> 264 Yaa Gyasi svnh 0 to-read 4.10 2020 Transcendent Kingdom
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: svnh
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place]]> 59249732
Another Appalachiaexamines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more,Another Appalachiamixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.]]> 171 Neema Avashia 1952271428 svnh 4 4.23 2022 Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
author: Neema Avashia
name: svnh
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: 2024, india, memoir, queer, southern, bipoc
review:

]]> Hijab Butch Blues 61111274 A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir.

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?

From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.

This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.]]> 284 Lamya H. 0593448766 svnh 0 to-read 4.47 2023 Hijab Butch Blues
author: Lamya H.
name: svnh
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Oklahomo: Pee, Peeping, Police, Pistols, Puritans, Pedophiles, and a Witch]]> 51593341 "I was a runaway gay, a dive bar drag queen, a rhinestone on the nation’s bible belt. I had a gun."

Mom and Mickey had the kind of marriage that wanted no witnesses and so they decided I was—at age seven—too old to be indoors; the house was locked until nightfall. I wasn't allowed to loiter around our yard either, I couldn't skulk behind its shrubs, so I waited instead in the abutting weed field. The field behind our house stretched from our wire fence to infinity. Its dense unmolested weeds grew several feet tall and had dried to resemble hay. I could sit there unnoticed, like an unnecessary extra from Children of the Corn, until the sun went down.

Some days from the weeds I saw Mom and Mickey through the family room's rear glass doors. She’d bend her long, shiny legs onto the avocado colored couch cushion, then lean into the recess of his hairy underarm for warmth. If something funny played on the television—something out of view to the exiled—the couple laughed jointly, heartily. They were like newlyweds.

Some days I saw something else. Fingers would point, hands would flail, then Mickey would grab a handful of Mom's hair, and Mom would grab a faceful of Mickey's fist. I'd climb the fence to bang on the glass door just as my mother's blonde shag haircut collided with the family room's brown shag carpet. Mickey'd open the door to casually push me to the ground like King Kong swatting a tiny effeminate helicopter from the sky. Mom glared at me from the floor as if I'd interrupted intercourse.

But most days the room was empty, there was nothing to see. I’d close my eyes to quiet my disquiet, focusing all my impotent energy on willing the blue out of the sky. When that failed and daylight lingered intolerably, I prayed—to God, then to Satan—for nightfall. I repeated the cycle until one of them conceded, though their untimeliness made it hard to be certain whom to thank.

You meet people when you can’t go home, people like Raskell who chased me away with a baseball bat, or Benedict—the Korean Wonder Woman. I met Mort too, a man who owned an arcade, he taught me to play foosball. Foosball lessons aren’t cheap though, there was a price to pay. Mort had been a professional photographer for one of the top modeling schools in Oregon before he moved here to take over the arcade. He missed photography so I agreed to let him practice by taking photos of me in the arcade’s backroom in exchange for the free foosball lessons. Mort was mostly accustomed to photographing girls so he suggested it would be best if I posed how I thought a girl would pose; I thought a girl might blow a kiss and point a finger toward her boobs, Mort agreed. It was nice to have a place to go, especially on hot or cold days. One day I knocked on the arcade door but it was padlocked and no one answered. A few days later it was still locked and the window sign was painted over. It stayed that way until I stopped checking.

Outdoors again, eventually I stopped going home; I was a runaway, unless you have to be pursued by parents for that term to apply. But—much like a wolfpack that raises a feral boy—a gaggle of drag queens happened along. The glittering gargantuas plucked me from the weeds (curbside really, in the middle of a night). They took me to a pancake house and gave me breakfast, then lessons in lip-sync and a place to sleep; there were prices to pay there too.


Oklahomo is funny and disturbing, the kaleidoscopic memoir of a poorly chaperoned child, then entirely unchaperoned teen in the gay underground of the nation’s midwest. From an underage mother and violent father figure; to run-ins with police, puritans, pedophiles, and a witch; to working as a barely teenage drag queen in the bible belt of the 1980s—it’s a story that keeps no secrets, no matter how distasteful.]]> 282 C.T. Madrigal 0998769401 svnh 0 to-read 4.20 Oklahomo: Pee, Peeping, Police, Pistols, Puritans, Pedophiles, and a Witch
author: C.T. Madrigal
name: svnh
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hadriana in All My Dreams 33508902 veritable l'amour."
--Kirkus Reviews, Starred review

"You've never read about a zombie like Hadriana. Transformed into the walking dead on her wedding day, Hadriana becomes part of popular legend, one imbued with magic, eroticism, and even humor."
--Tor.com

"You do not need to believe in zombies or Vodou to be carried away by this story--a metaphor for all forms of dispossession. . . . Rene Depestre has gone beyond nostalgia to write a sumptuous love story."
-- Le Monde

With a foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover.

Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, and then disappears into popular legend.

Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti's Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre's lusty claim that all beings--even the undead ones--have a right to happiness and true love.

From the introduction by Edwidge Danticat:
Despestre offers us the kind of tale we rarely get in the hundreds of zombie stories featuring Haitians, stories set both inside and outside of Haiti. In Hadriana in All My Dreams we get both langaj--the secret language of Haitian Vodou--as well as the type of descriptive, elegiac, erotic, and satirical language, and the artistic license needed to create this most nuanced and powerful novel.]]> 196 René Depestre 1617755559 svnh 0 to-read 3.46 1988 Hadriana in All My Dreams
author: René Depestre
name: svnh
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Open City 8526694
But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.]]> 259 Teju Cole 1400068096 svnh 0 to-read 3.50 2011 Open City
author: Teju Cole
name: svnh
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hurting Kind: Poems 59571658 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,� writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.� What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols�?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others� stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,� writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”]]> 100 Ada Limon 1639550496 svnh 5 4.34 2022 The Hurting Kind: Poems
author: Ada Limon
name: svnh
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: 2023, poetry, bipoc, the-softest-places
review:

]]> Flamer 52751434 Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love.

I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both.

I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe.

It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.]]> 366 Mike Curato 1250756146 svnh 0 to-read 4.30 2020 Flamer
author: Mike Curato
name: svnh
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions]]> 336843 114 Larry Mitchell 0930762002 svnh 5 2023, queer 4.52 1977 The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
author: Larry Mitchell
name: svnh
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/11
date added: 2023/07/11
shelves: 2023, queer
review:

]]> Detransition, Baby 48890225 A whipsmart debut about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.]]> 337 Torrey Peters 0593133374 svnh 0 to-read 3.94 2021 Detransition, Baby
author: Torrey Peters
name: svnh
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence]]> 46752 -from "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street"

The landmark modern novel Mrs. Dalloway creates a portrait of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote this masterwork, she explored in a series of fascinating stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party.
Wonderfully captivating, the seven stories in Mrs. Dalloway's Party create a dynamic and delightful portrait of what Woolf called "party consciousness." As parallel expressions of the themes of Mrs. Dalloway, these stories provide a valuable window into Woolf's writing mind and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.]]> 80 Virginia Woolf 0156029324 svnh 3 2015, modernisms 3.88 Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence
author: Virginia Woolf
name: svnh
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/06
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves: 2015, modernisms
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration]]> 89213 Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays � a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation � Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.]]> 288 David Wojnarowicz 0679732276 svnh 0 4.49 1991 Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
author: David Wojnarowicz
name: svnh
average rating: 4.49
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/09
shelves: currently-reading, 2023, queer
review:

]]> The Only Good Indians 52180399 The creeping horror of Paul Tremblay meets Tommy Orange’s There There in a dark novel of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.]]> 305 Stephen Graham Jones 1982136456 svnh 0 to-read 3.68 2020 The Only Good Indians
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: svnh
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood]]> 48465 496 Flannery O'Connor svnh 0 4.32 1960 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: svnh
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2016, southern, unfinished, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History]]> 2016619 206 Heather Love 0674026527 svnh 0 2013, to-read 4.20 2007 Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
author: Heather Love
name: svnh
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2013, to-read
review:
Pretty excited about this one.
]]> Mississippi Sissy 178758 Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In a memoir that echoes bestsellers like The Liar's Club, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.]]> 320 Kevin Sessums 0312341016 svnh 4 3.60 2007 Mississippi Sissy
author: Kevin Sessums
name: svnh
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/09
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: memoir, nonfiction, southern, 2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy]]> 52569124
Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how these emotional experiences influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships.

Polysecure is both a trailblaizing theoretical treatise and a practical guide. It provides nonmonogamous people with a new set of tools to navigate the complexities of multiple loving relationships, and offers radical new concepts that are sure to influence the conversation about attachment theory.]]> 268 Jessica Fern 1944934987 svnh 0 4.36 2020 Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
author: Jessica Fern
name: svnh
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2022, nonfiction, queer, trauma, unfinished
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy]]> 21029



Hailed by Jerome Frank as "the best book that exists on the subject," Irvin D. Yalom's The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has been the standard text in the field for decades.

In this completely revised and updated fifth edition, Dr. Yalom and his collaborator Dr. Molyn Leszcz expand the book to include the most recent developments in the field, drawing on nearly a decade of new research as well as their broad clinical wisdom and expertise.
New topics include: online therapy, specialized groups, ethnocultural diversity, trauma and managed care.

At once scholarly and lively, this is the most up-to-date, incisive, and comprehensive text available on group psychotherapy.]]> 688 Irvin D. Yalom 0465092845 svnh 0 in-theory, 2022, nonfiction 4.19 1967 The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
author: Irvin D. Yalom
name: svnh
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: in-theory, 2022, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy, 2)]]> 53843459 Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision� and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.]]> 174 Alexis Pauline Gumbs 1849353972 svnh 5 4.43 2020 Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy, 2)
author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
name: svnh
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2020, feminist-forward, nonfiction, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice]]> 56019003
What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

With chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba's work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, "Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone."]]> 240 Mariame Kaba 164259525X svnh 5 4.65 2021 We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
author: Mariame Kaba
name: svnh
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2022, feminist-forward, nonfiction, bipoc
review:

]]> Postcolonial Love Poem 44094069 Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.� In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.� Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.]]> 107 Natalie Díaz 1644450143 svnh 5 2022, poetry, queer, bipoc 4.33 2020 Postcolonial Love Poem
author: Natalie Díaz
name: svnh
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2022, poetry, queer, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head]]> 55835966 Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.

Mama, I made it
out of your home,
alive, raised by the
voices in my head.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.

The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.]]> 86 Warsan Shire 0593134354 svnh 5 2022, poetry, bipoc 4.21 2022 Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
author: Warsan Shire
name: svnh
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/01
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: 2022, poetry, bipoc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)]]> 40743450 How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.


Building on the success of her popularEmergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

]]> 441 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849353271 svnh 0 to-read 4.25 2019 Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)
author: Adrienne Maree Brown
name: svnh
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins]]> 2834 512 Mark Twain 0195114159 svnh 3 4.01 1894 The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins
author: Mark Twain
name: svnh
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1894
rating: 3
read at: 2008/10/01
date added: 2021/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Disgrace 409449 Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 1999

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University.

Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie - whom he describes as having hips "as slim as a 12-year-old's" - obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie's boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy's small holding in the country.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.]]> 220 J.M. Coetzee svnh 4 2014 3.81 1999 Disgrace
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: svnh
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2014/03/11
date added: 2021/07/14
shelves: 2014
review:

]]> Sudden Death 25614601 A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century that continue to reverberate throughout modernity—a story unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

Sudden Deathbegins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody, it’s a manual.

In this mind-bending, prismatic novel, worlds collide, time coils, traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, utopias, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Álvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short, powerful punch of a novel. Game, set, match.]]> 272 Álvaro Enrigue 1594633460 svnh 0 to-read 3.69 2013 Sudden Death
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: svnh
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Pedagogy of the Oppressed 35882972 Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberan, Noam Chomsky, Ramon Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren and Margo Okazawa-Rey to inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.]]> 232 Paulo Freire 1501314130 svnh 4 4.38 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed
author: Paulo Freire
name: svnh
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/15
date added: 2020/09/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Luster 51541496
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.]]> 227 Raven Leilani 0374194327 svnh 0 to-read 3.51 2020 Luster
author: Raven Leilani
name: svnh
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)]]> 36336078 Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.]]> 248 André Aciman 1786495252 svnh 0 to-read 4.08 2007 Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)
author: André Aciman
name: svnh
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/06/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find � and keep � love]]> 46225610 Is there a science to love?

In this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller reveal how an understanding of attachment theory-the most advanced relationship science in existence today-can help us find and sustain love. Attachment theory forms the basis for many bestselling books on the parent/child relationship, but there has yet to be an accessible guide to what this fascinating science has to tell us about adult romantic relationships-until now.

Attachment theory owes its inception to British psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who in the 1950s examined the tremendous impact that our early relationships with our parents or caregivers has on the people we become. Also central to attachment theory is the discovery that our need to be in a close relationship with one or more individuals is embedded in our genes.

In Attached, Levine and Heller trace how these evolutionary influences continue to shape who we are in our relationships today. According to attachment theory, every person behaves in relationships in one of three distinct ways:

*ANXIOUS people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back.
*AVOIDANT people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.
*SECURE people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.

Attached guides readers in determining what attachment style they and their mate (or potential mates) follow. It also offers readers a wealth of advice on how to navigate their relationships more wisely given their attachment style and that of their partner. An insightful look at the science behind love, Attached offers readers a road map for building stronger, more fulfilling connections.]]> 294 Amir Levine 1529032172 svnh 0 to-read 4.19 2010 Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find – and keep – love
author: Amir Levine
name: svnh
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rust Belt Femme 53127663
Raechel and her mother struggled for money: they were evicted, went days without utilities, and took their trauma out on one another. Raechel escaped to the progressive suburbs of Cleveland Heights, leaving the tractors and ranch-style homes home in favor of a city with vintage marquees, music clubs, and people who talked about big ideas. It was the early 90s, full of Nirvana songs and chokers, flannel shirts and cut-off jean shorts, lesbian witches and local coffee shops.

Rust Belt Femme is the story of how these twin foundations—rural Ohio poverty and alternative 90s culture—made Raechel into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.]]> 150 Raechel Anne Jolie 1948742632 svnh 4 2020 4.06 2020 Rust Belt Femme
author: Raechel Anne Jolie
name: svnh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/26
date added: 2020/04/26
shelves: 2020
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness]]> 83293 White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources—literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses—to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers� in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace� to the white race, threats that needed to be confined and involuntarily sterilized.

Part historical inquiry and part sociological investigation, Not Quite White demonstrates the power of social categories and boundaries to shape social relationships and institutions, to invent groups where none exist, and to influence policies and legislation that end up harming the very people they aim to help. It illuminates not only the cultural significance and consequences of poor white stereotypes but also how dominant whites exploited and expanded these stereotypes to bolster and defend their own fragile claims to whiteness.]]> 232 Matt Wray 0822338734 svnh 0 to-read 3.66 2006 Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
author: Matt Wray
name: svnh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Year of Magical Thinking 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 svnh 3 2020 3.94 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking
author: Joan Didion
name: svnh
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2020/03/28
date added: 2020/03/28
shelves: 2020
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists]]> 39791088
"We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and Maria unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?" - Yulin Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico

In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a "just recovery."

All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit .

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and No Is Not Enough.

"

Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the 'battle of utopias' that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico-a battle that pits a pitilessly neoliberal plutocratic 'paradise' against a community movement with Puerto Rican sovereignty at its center."
-Junot Diaz

"We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and Maria unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?"
-Carmen Yulin Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico

"A gripping and timely account of classic 'shock doctrine' being perpetrated in Puerto Rico. Naomi Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island's financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington's imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony."

-Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. "Like so many of my generation, I've been a reader of Naomi Klein's since the late 1990s, always finding something to learn from her rigorous reporting and thoughtful analysis. There's no one better to tell the story of Hurricane Maria and its global significance than Naomi. In the face of speculation, exploitation, and climate crisis, this book calls on us to recognize Puerto Rico's struggle for democracy, justice, and human life itself, as our own." -Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona, Spain

"]]> 88 Naomi Klein 1608463575 svnh 4 2020 4.24 2018 The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists
author: Naomi Klein
name: svnh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/19
date added: 2020/03/19
shelves: 2020
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within]]> 578518 171 Natalie Goldberg 0877733759 svnh 0 to-read 4.10 1986 Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: svnh
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Three Women 42201100 A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

Hailed as “a dazzling achievement� (Los Angeles Times) and “riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance� (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics—and topped bestseller lists—worldwide.

In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.

Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy� (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.]]> 306 Lisa Taddeo 1451642296 svnh 0 to-read 3.72 2019 Three Women
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: svnh
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> On Beauty and Being Just 118288 On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a surfeit of aliveness. In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.]]> 144 Elaine Scarry 0691089590 svnh 0 in-theory 3.64 1999 On Beauty and Being Just
author: Elaine Scarry
name: svnh
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/03/04
shelves: in-theory
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]]> <![CDATA[Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion]]> 43126457 Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.]]> 303 Jia Tolentino 0525510540 svnh 0 to-read 4.04 2019 Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
author: Jia Tolentino
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/03/04
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]]> <![CDATA[You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance]]> 37959939
Modern astrology isn’t about passively accepting our fate, it’s about action, and beloved astrologer Chani Nicholas shows you how to bring this life-changing practice into your life and embrace self-empowerment, intentionality, and spirituality. Gone are the days of "on Tuesday you will meet your prince charming" horoscopes. Instead, Nicholas is spearheading a radical new approach to astrology. In her hip, inspirational weekly horoscopes, she doesn’t tell readers what will happen to them. Instead, she encourages her devotees to take control—to confront themselves, their desires, and their needs—to fulfill their potential using the power of the stars.

Written in her lyrical, cool-girl, feminist writing style, You Were Born for This explains how knowing your star signs and what they mean for your individual character can be revelatory. Understanding the astrological chart can help you refine your intentions, identify your strengths, recognize areas for growth, become more connected to your core self, and steer you on your spiritual path.

In an era when growing numbers of people feel a sense of meaninglessness and a desire to learn more about themselves, You Were Born for This teaches you how to harness the zodiac to help you become more in tune with yourself and your place in the universe.]]> Chani Nicholas 0062866915 svnh 0 to-read 4.21 2020 You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance
author: Chani Nicholas
name: svnh
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/18
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]]> Another Country 334170 Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the late 1950s.]]> 436 James Baldwin 0679744711 svnh 0 to-read 4.30 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics]]> 16157123 Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”—reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.

Poets in Troubling the Line: Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Aimee Herman, Amir Rabiyah, Ari Banias, Ariel Goldberg, Bo Luengsuraswat, CAConrad, Ching-In Chen, Cole Krawitz, D’Lo, David Wolach, Dawn Lundy Martin, Drew Krewer, Duriel E. Harris, EC Crandall, Eileen Myles, Eli Clare, Ely Shipley, Emerson Whitney, Eric Karin, Fabian Romero, Gr Keer, HR Hegnauer, J. Rice, j/j hastain, Jaime Shearn Coan, Jake Pam Dick, Jen (Jay) Besemer, Jenny Johnson, John Wieners, Joy Ladin, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, kari edwards, Kit Yan, Laura Neuman, Lilith Latini, Lizz Bronson, Lori Selke, Max Wolf Valerio, Meg Day, Micha Cárdenas, Monica / Nico Peck, Natro, Oliver Bendorf, Reba Overkill, Samuel Ace, Stacey Waite, Stephen Burt, TC Tolbert, Tim Trace Peterson, Trish Salah, TT Jax, Y. Madrone, Yosmay del Mazo & Zoe Tuck.

TC Tolbert, a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice, is the author of territories of folding, spirare, and the forthcoming Gephyromania. Tolbert lives in Tucson.

Tim Trace Peterson is a poet, critic, and editor. The author of Since I Moved In and Violet Speech, Peterson is co-editor of the forthcoming Gil Ott: Collected Writings and lives in Brooklyn.]]> 544 T.C. Tolbert 1937658104 svnh 0 to-read 4.48 2013 Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
author: T.C. Tolbert
name: svnh
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Crying Book 43835525
Told in short, poetic snippets, The Crying Book delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women’s agency―or lack of agency―in everyday life. Christle’s gift is the freshness of her voice and honesty of her approach, both of which create an intimacy with readers as she explores a human behavior broadly experienced but rarely questioned. A beautiful tribute to the power of crying, and to working through despair to tears of joy.]]> 208 Heather Christle 1948226448 svnh 0 to-read 3.83 2019 The Crying Book
author: Heather Christle
name: svnh
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals]]> 37569338 National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals--her friends--who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green.

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets.

This restorative memoir reflects on the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals--Sy's friends--and the truths revealed by their grace. It also explores vast themes: the otherness and sameness of people and animals; the various ways we learn to love and become empathetic; how we find our passion; how we create our families; coping with loss and despair; gratitude; forgiveness; and most of all, how to be a good creature in the world.]]> 208 Sy Montgomery 0544938321 svnh 4 2019 4.04 2018 How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
author: Sy Montgomery
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/05
date added: 2019/12/05
shelves: 2019
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone]]> 38461
For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a major work of American literature.]]> 496 James Baldwin 0375701893 svnh 0 to-read 4.32 1968 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Nobody Knows My Name 38458
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this “splendid book� ( The New York Times ) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays along with personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

“James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human. To take a cue from his title, we had better learn his name.� � The New York Times]]> 242 James Baldwin 0679744738 svnh 0 to-read 4.37 1961 Nobody Knows My Name
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/27
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]]> I Am Not Your Negro 33198164 I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.]]> 144 James Baldwin 0525434690 svnh 0 to-read 4.49 2017 I Am Not Your Negro
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/27
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 svnh 0 to-read 4.06 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: svnh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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]]> The Water Dancer 43982054 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here and here.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.]]> 416 Ta-Nehisi Coates svnh 0 to-read 4.03 2019 The Water Dancer
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: svnh
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/27
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]]> <![CDATA[We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy]]> 33916061
But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period--and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective--the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including Fear of a Black President, The Case for Reparations and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.]]> 367 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0399590560 svnh 0 to-read 4.37 2017 We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: svnh
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Girls 26893819 355 Emma Cline 081299860X svnh 4 2019 3.48 2016 The Girls
author: Emma Cline
name: svnh
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/11
date added: 2019/11/11
shelves: 2019
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]]> <![CDATA[The Archive of Alternate Endings]]> 42770439 The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold.

In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg’s sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can’t come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy.

Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.]]> 159 Lindsey Drager 1945814829 svnh 0 to-read 4.09 2019 The Archive of Alternate Endings
author: Lindsey Drager
name: svnh
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Backroads of Paradise: A Journey to Rediscover Old Florida]]> 29502699 240 Cathy Salustri 0813062969 svnh 3 2019 3.44 2016 Backroads of Paradise: A Journey to Rediscover Old Florida
author: Cathy Salustri
name: svnh
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2019/11/04
date added: 2019/11/04
shelves: 2019
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]]> After the Parade 27276368 Publishers Weekly) that “provides considerable pleasure and emotional power� (The New York Times Book Review)—about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a tragicomic road trip deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood.

Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes.

After Aaron’s father died in the town parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood who helped Aaron find his place in a world hostile to difference. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores—his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother—vanished one night. And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing Aaron to rethink his place in the world.

“Touching and often hilarious…Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world…� (Booklist, starred review). “Everything here aches, from the lucid prose to the sensitively treated characters to their beautiful and heartbreaking stories…An example of realism in its most potent iteration: not a nearly arranged plot orchestrated by an authorial god but an authentic, empathetic representation of life as it truly is� (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After the Parade is a glorious anthem for the outsider.]]> 356 Lori Ostlund 1476790116 svnh 4 2019 4.03 2015 After the Parade
author: Lori Ostlund
name: svnh
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/31
date added: 2019/07/31
shelves: 2019
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]]> The White Album 421 The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0374532079 svnh 4 2019 4.06 1979 The White Album
author: Joan Didion
name: svnh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/18
date added: 2019/06/18
shelves: 2019
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]]> The Argonauts 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 svnh 4 4.04 2015 The Argonauts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/30
date added: 2019/04/30
shelves: 2019, gender, memoir, nonfiction
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]]> Something Bright, Then Holes 263258 Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book's three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend's hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson's singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson's steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.]]> 112 Maggie Nelson 1933368802 svnh 0 to-read 4.07 2003 Something Bright, Then Holes
author: Maggie Nelson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning]]> 11107324
Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.]]> 304 Maggie Nelson 0393072150 svnh 0 to-read 4.23 2011 The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
author: Maggie Nelson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/28
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]]> The Red Parts 263257
In an instance of remarkable serendipity, more than three decades later, a 2004 DNA match led to the arrest of a new suspect for Jane's murder at precisely the same time that Nelson was set to publish a book of poetry about her aunt's life and death - a book she had been working on for years, and which assumed her aunt's case to be closed forever.

The Red Parts chronicles the uncanny series of events that led to Nelson's interest in her aunt's death, the reopening of the case, the bizarre and brutal trial that ensued, and the effects these events had on the disparate group of people they brought together. But The Red Parts is much more than a "true crime" record of a murder, investigation, and trial. For into this story Nelson has woven an account of a girlhood and early adulthood haunted by loss, mortality, mystery, and betrayal, as well as a look at the personal and political consequences of our cultural fixation on dead (white) women.]]> 201 Maggie Nelson 141653203X svnh 0 to-read 4.04 2007 The Red Parts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: svnh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> Slouching Towards Bethlehem 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion svnh 4 2019 4.20 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
author: Joan Didion
name: svnh
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/23
date added: 2019/03/23
shelves: 2019
review:

]]> The Great Believers 36739329
Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library’s Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai svnh 0 to-read 4.29 2018 The Great Believers
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: svnh
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 svnh 4 2019 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: svnh
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2019/02/07
date added: 2019/02/07
shelves: 2019
review:

]]>