Will's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 09 Feb 2025 10:30:17 -0800 60 Will's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones]]> 40121378 Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:
-ĚýMake time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
-ĚýOvercome a lack of motivation and willpower;
- Design your environment to make success easier;
- Get back on track when you fall off course;
...and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.]]>
319 James Clear Will 5 4.34 2018 Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
author: James Clear
name: Will
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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The Crystal World: A Novel 22880886 195 J.G. Ballard Will 3 3.46 1966 The Crystal World: A Novel
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Will
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
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Borne (Borne, #1) 32783363
At first, Borne looks like nothing at all—just a green lump that might be a Company discard. The Company, although severely damaged, is rumoured to still make creatures and send them to distant places that have not yet suffered Collapse.

Borne somehow reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. She feels an attachment she resents; attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, the Balcony Cliffs, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick, not to render Borne down to raw genetic material for the drugs he sells—she cannot break that bond.

Wick is a special kind of supplier, because the drug dealers in the city don’t sell the usual things. They sell tiny creatures that can be swallowed or stuck in the ear, and that release powerful memories of other people’s happier times or pull out forgotten memories from the user’s own mind—or just produce beautiful visions that provide escape from the barren, craterous landscapes of the city.

Against his better judgment, out of affection for Rachel or perhaps some other impulse, Wick respects her decision. Rachel, meanwhile, despite her loyalty to Wick, knows he has kept secrets from her. Searching his apartment, she finds a burnt, unreadable journal titled “Mord,� a cryptic reference to the Magician (a rival drug dealer) and evidence that Wick has planned the layout of the Balcony Cliffs to match the blueprint of the Company building. What is he hiding? Why won’t he tell her about what happened when he worked for the Company?]]>
336 Jeff VanderMeer Will 3 4.01 2017 Borne (Borne, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Will
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/31
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<![CDATA[On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century]]> 34083908
On TyrannyĚýis a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.]]>
110 Timothy Snyder 0804190127 Will 5 4.45 2017 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Will
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/28
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Dark Matter 27833670 A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]>
342 Blake Crouch 1101904224 Will 0 to-read 4.13 2016 Dark Matter
author: Blake Crouch
name: Will
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Will 0 to-read 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Will
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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Creation Lake 207595731
“Sadie Smith� is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.]]>
416 Rachel Kushner 1982116544 Will 4 3.59 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Will
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/27
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Solaris 23632478 Solaris remains a book constantly rediscovered by new generations of readers. The moving story of contact with alien intelligence serves as a canvas for discussion of our mind’s limitations and the nature of human cognition. A love story for some readers, a philosophical treatise for others; Lem’s inspiring masterpiece defies unambiguous interpretations.

The novel has been translated into over forty languages and sold several million copies. This is the first English translation directly from the original.]]>
179 Stanisław Lem 8363471410 Will 3 3.89 1961 Solaris
author: Stanisław Lem
name: Will
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1961
rating: 3
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Train Dreams 12702554 Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions.

Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—the new novella by the National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.]]>
125 Denis Johnson 1429995203 Will 2 3.97 2002 Train Dreams
author: Denis Johnson
name: Will
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2002
rating: 2
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Dark Places 6569735 370 Gillian Flynn Will 2 3.99 2009 Dark Places
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Will
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
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<![CDATA[Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)]]> 92250
The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.]]>
119 Tony Kushner 1559360615 Will 4 4.27 1993 Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)
author: Tony Kushner
name: Will
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1993
rating: 4
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Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1) 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]>
325 Toni Morrison Will 5 currently-reading 3.96 1987 Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)
author: Toni Morrison
name: Will
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence]]> 58117439 INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER“Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick,as heard on Fresh AirThis book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. Ěý In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.]]> 297 Anna Lembke Will 4 4.22 2021 Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
author: Anna Lembke
name: Will
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/12
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Antkind 48995413
All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language,ĚýB. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likesâ€� and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bĂŞte noire and his raison d’être.

A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.]]>
678 Charlie Kaufman 0399589708 Will 4
However, most of the rest of the book was hilarious and often heartening in unexpected and very contemporary ways. I highlighted a lot of funny lines, and it's a novel I won't soon forget (and I may read it again someday). ]]>
3.66 2020 Antkind
author: Charlie Kaufman
name: Will
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/06
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On the whole, I really enjoyed this! It's working best when it's funny. The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars is that there are parts, especially during the middle third or so, that started to drag. In those moments, I didn't understand the point, and I found the book less funny and endearing, as if it was aiming for some kind of metafictional, postmodernist literature-of-ideas thing that I didn't entirely get.

However, most of the rest of the book was hilarious and often heartening in unexpected and very contemporary ways. I highlighted a lot of funny lines, and it's a novel I won't soon forget (and I may read it again someday).
]]>
Portnoy's Complaint 394964
"Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience."Ěýâ€� TheĚýNew York Times Book Review

"Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented. " —New York Review of Books

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fĂĽr Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.]]>
274 Philip Roth 0679756450 Will 5 3.69 1969 Portnoy's Complaint
author: Philip Roth
name: Will
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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Wonder Boys 38213392 ĚýMordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction.ĚýThis ebook features a biography of the author.]]> 388 Michael Chabon Will 5 3.95 1995 Wonder Boys
author: Michael Chabon
name: Will
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/05
date added: 2023/11/05
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Less (Arthur Less, #1) 39927096 You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

If you are Arthur Less.

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.

A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,� “elegiac,� “ingenious,� as well as “too sappy by half,� Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.]]>
273 Andrew Sean Greer Will 5 3.61 2017 Less (Arthur Less, #1)
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Will
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/22
date added: 2023/10/22
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<![CDATA[Me and Earl and the Dying Girl]]> 12700353
Until Greg's mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel.

Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia—cue extreme adolescent awkwardness—but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed. When Rachel stops treatment, Greg and Earl decide the thing to do is to make a film for her, which turns into the Worst Film Ever Made and becomes a turning point in each of their lives.

And all at once Greg must abandon invisibility and stand in the spotlight.]]>
295 Jesse Andrews 1419701762 Will 4 3.53 2012 Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
author: Jesse Andrews
name: Will
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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The Great Believers 53430792 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A NEW YORK TIMES Selection for BEST 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
A PICK FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S 2018 BEST BOOKS
THE PERFECT HOLIDAY GIFT FOR READERS

“A page turner...An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis. "�The New York Times Book Review

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai

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

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona's stories unfold in incredibly moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness in the face of disaster.]]>
431 Rebecca Makkai Will 4 4.44 2018 The Great Believers
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Will
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/30
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Nothing to See Here 44527740
Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.

Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for?]]>
277 Kevin Wilson Will 2 3.99 2019 Nothing to See Here
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Will
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/09
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The Bell Tolls for No One 25904363 290 Charles Bukowski Will 4 3.68 2015 The Bell Tolls for No One
author: Charles Bukowski
name: Will
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/26
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Lake Life 52756708 From the award-winning author of the acclaimed story collection The Heaven of Animals, called “a wise debut…beautiful [stories] with a rogue touch� (The New York Times Book Review), comes a sweeping, domestic novel about a family that reunites at their North Carolina lake house for one last vacation before the home is sold—and the long-buried secrets that are finally revealed.

The Starling family is scattered across the country. Parents Richard and Lisa live in Ithaca, New York, and work at Cornell University. Their son Michael, a salesperson, lives in Dallas with his elementary school teacher wife, Diane. Michael’s brother, Thad, an aspiring poet, makes his home in New York City with his famous painter boyfriend, Jake. For years they’ve traveled to North Carolina to share a summer vacation at the family lake house.

That tradition is coming to an end, as Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings—alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.

Set in today’s America, Lake Life is a beautifully rendered, emotionally compelling novel in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth.]]>
295 David James Poissant 1476729999 Will 5 3.65 2020 Lake Life
author: David James Poissant
name: Will
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]>
182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Will 4 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Will
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 4
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Spook Country (Blue Ant, #2) 6610589

Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.


Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.


Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.


Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post "rave."


Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), "One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century."

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498 William Gibson 1101147288 Will 3 4.02 2007 Spook Country (Blue Ant, #2)
author: William Gibson
name: Will
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/20
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The Stream of Life 153462
Ăgua viva, longo texto ficcional em forma de monĂłlogo, foi lançado pela primeira vez em 1973, poucos anos antes da morte de Clarice que, nessa Ă©poca, já se consagrara como um dos valores mais sĂłlidos da nossa literatura, por seu estilo Ăşnico, em que a grande preocupação era a busca permanente pela linguagem.

Ăgua viva Ă© um desafio emocionante para quem lĂŞ ou relĂŞ Clarice Lispector. Traz uma linguagem que nĂŁo se perde no tempo; ao contrário, Ă© ricamente metafĂłrica, em que coisas, ações e emoções do dia-a-dia se transformam em grandiosas digressões indagadoras sobre o sentido da existĂŞncia e da vida. Seguindo a linha de caracterĂ­sticas introspectivas de seus livros, Clarice cria uma obra singular, verdadeiro relato Ă­ntimo que projeta em flashes, como num caleidoscĂłpio, verdadeiros resumos de estados de espĂ­rito em tom de confidĂŞncia, onde a subjetividade sobrepuja o factual e a narradora Ă© responsável pela cadĂŞncia do texto.

Nova edição do de um dos livros mais conhecidos de Clarice Lispector, agora com projeto gráfico de Victor Burton e capa criada a partir de pinturas da própria Clarice. Esta edição traz posfácio do poeta Eucanaã Ferraz.]]>
80 Clarice Lispector 0816617821 Will 2 4.26 1973 The Stream of Life
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Will
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1973
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)]]> 6137371 378 William Gibson 1101146419 Will 4 4.14 2003 Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)
author: William Gibson
name: Will
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/31
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Jernigan 282675 238 David Gates 0679737138 Will 5 4.05 1991 Jernigan
author: David Gates
name: Will
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1991
rating: 5
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Sea of Tranquility 58601245 The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

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

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

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

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]>
226 Emily St. John Mandel Will 5 4.19 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Will
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/03
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<![CDATA[The Unraveling of Mercy Louis: A Novel]]> 24877700
In Port Sabine, the air is thick with oil, superstition reigns, and dreams hang on making a winning play. All eyes are on Mercy Louis, the star of the championship girls� basketball team. Mercy seems destined for greatness, but the road out of town is riddled with obstacles. There is her grandmother, Evelia, a strict evangelical who has visions of an imminent Rapture and sees herself as the keeper of Mercy’s virtue. There are the cryptic letters from Charmaine, the mother who abandoned Mercy at birth. And then there’s Travis, the boy who shakes the foundation of her faith.

At the periphery of Mercy’s world floats team manager Illa Stark, a lonely wallflower whose days are spent caring for a depressed mother crippled in a refinery accident. Like the rest of the town, Illa is spellbound by Mercy’s beauty and talent, but a note discovered in Mercy’s gym locker reveals that her life may not be as perfect as it appears.

The last day of school brings the disturbing discovery, and as summer unfolds and the police investigate, every girl becomes a suspect. When Mercy collapses on the opening night of the season, Evelia prophesies that she is only the first to fall, and soon, other girls are afflicted by the mysterious condition, sending the town into a tailspin, and bringing Illa and Mercy together in an unexpected way.

Evocative and unsettling, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis charts the downfall of one town’s golden girl while exploring the brutality and anxieties of girlhood in America.]]>
355 Keija Parssinen 0062319116 Will 5 3.75 2015 The Unraveling of Mercy Louis: A Novel
author: Keija Parssinen
name: Will
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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The Shadows 50059530 The haunting new thriller from Alex North, author of the New York Times bestseller The Whisper Man.

You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile--always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it’s attracted that strange kind of infamy that only exists on the darkest corners of the internet--and inspired more than one copycat.

Paul Adams remembers the case all too well: Crabtree--and his victim--were Paul’s friends. Paul has slowly put his life back together. But now his mother, old and senile, has taken a turn for the worse. Though every inch of him resists, it is time to come home.

It's not long before things start to go wrong. Reading the news, Paul learns another copycat has struck. His mother is distressed, insistent that there's something in the house. And someone is following him. Which reminds him of the most unsettling thing about that awful day twenty-five years ago.

It wasn't just the murder.

It was the fact that afterward, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again...]]>
326 Alex North 1250318025 Will 2 3.86 2020 The Shadows
author: Alex North
name: Will
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[The Best American Short Stories 2021]]> 58109431 A collection of the year's best stories selected by celebrated two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor JesmynWard says that the best fiction offers the reader a sense of repair.The stories in this year's collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy's gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience. These stories are poignant reminders of the possibilities of as you sink into world after world, become character after character, as Ward writes, youforget yourself, and then, upon surfacing, know yourself and others anew.

The Best American Short Stories 2021 includes GABRIEL BUMP - BRANDON HOBSON - DAVID MEANS- JANE PEK - TRACEY ROSE PEYTON - GEORGE SAUNDERS - BRYAN WASHINGTON - KEVIN WILSON - C PAM ZHANG and others]]>
304 Jesmyn Ward 132848341X Will 3 3.90 2021 The Best American Short Stories 2021
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Will
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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Suicide Woods: Stories 43317570
Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me , he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh , Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods , a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods.

A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle� of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead.

In story after story, which have appeared in magazines ranging from the Virginia Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine to McSweeney’s and Ploughshares , Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.]]>
196 Benjamin Percy 1644450062 Will 4 3.64 2013 Suicide Woods: Stories
author: Benjamin Percy
name: Will
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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In the Lake of the Woods 18892473 A politician’s past war crimes are revealed in this psychologically haunting novel by the National Book Award–winning author of The Things They Carried. Ěý Vietnam veteran John Wade is running for senate when long-hidden secrets about his involvement in wartime atrocities come to light. But the loss of his political fortunes is only the beginning of John’s downfall. A retreat with his wife, Kathy, to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota only exacerbates the tensions rising between them. Then, within days of their arrival, Kathy mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness. Ěý When a police search fails to locate her, suspicion falls on the disgraced politician with a violent past. But when John himself disappears, the questions mount—with no answers in sight. In this contemplative thriller, acclaimed author Tim O’Brien examines America’s legacy of violence and warfare and its lasting impact both at home and abroad.]]> 322 Tim O'Brien 0547527047 Will 3 3.78 1994 In the Lake of the Woods
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Will
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1994
rating: 3
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2666 19865580 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness,beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student caring for her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the desert sprawl of Santa Teresa--a fictional Juárez--on the US-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Audacious, impassioned and profoundly inspired, 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork.

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913 Roberto Bolaño Will 5 4.04 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Will
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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I'm Thinking of Ending Things 40605223 Now a Netflix original movie, this deeply scary and intensely unnerving novel follows a couple in the midst of a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease. You will be scared. But you won’t know why�

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

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

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

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.]]>
241 Iain Reid Will 5 3.53 2016 I'm Thinking of Ending Things
author: Iain Reid
name: Will
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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Silver Water 32997331 11 Amy Bloom Will 5 4.11 Silver Water
author: Amy Bloom
name: Will
average rating: 4.11
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Valley of the Dolls 54858253 454 Jacqueline Susann Will 2 4.15 1966 Valley of the Dolls
author: Jacqueline Susann
name: Will
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1966
rating: 2
read at: 2020/09/05
date added: 2021/05/10
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Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]>
340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Will 0 to-read 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Will
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism]]> 50155421 The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor, and historian offers an expert guide to understanding the appeal of the strongman as a leader and an explanation for why authoritarianism is back with a menacing twenty-first century twist.

Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, to strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule--that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else.

People, she argues, are not just ideological; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunistic. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities, and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power.

Drawing on reporting in Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil; using historical examples including Stalinist central Europe and Nazi Germany; and investigating related phenomena: the modern conspiracy theory, nostalgia for a golden past, political polarization, and meritocracy and its discontents, Anne Applebaum brilliantly illuminates the seduction of totalitarian thinking and the eternal appeal of the one-party state.]]>
224 Anne Applebaum 0771005857 Will 5 3.87 2020 Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
author: Anne Applebaum
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average rating: 3.87
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rating: 5
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Things We Didn't See Coming 6348441 174 Steven Amsterdam 1740667018 Will 5 3.30 2009 Things We Didn't See Coming
author: Steven Amsterdam
name: Will
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2009
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<![CDATA[The Best American Short Stories 2020]]> 48932355 Best American Short StoriesĚýseries. “They were windows into emotions I had and hadn’t had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.â€� Decades later, Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year’s edition. The result is a striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To read these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.Ěý

Godmother tea / Selena Anderson --
The apartment / T.C. Boyle --
A faithful but melancholy account of several barbarities lately committed / Jason Brown --
Sibling rivalry / Michael Byers --
The nanny / Emma Cline --
Halloween / Marian Crotty --
Something Street / Carolyn Ferrell --
This is pleasure / Mary Gaitskill --
In the event / Meng Jin --
The children / Andrea Lee --
Rubberdust / Sarah Thankam Mathews --
It's not you / Elizabeth McCracken --
Liberté / Scott Nadelson --
Howl Palace / Leigh Newman --
The nine-tailed fox explains / Jane Pek --
The hands of dirty children / Alejandro Puyana --
Octopus VII / Anna Reeser --
Enlightenment / William Pei Shih --
Kennedy / Kevin Wilson --
The special world / Tiphanie Yanique]]>
370 Curtis Sittenfeld 1328485374 Will 4 3.66 2020 The Best American Short Stories 2020
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Will
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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Speak No Evil 40535477 "A lovely slender volume that packs in entire worlds with complete mastery. Speak No Evil explains so much about our times and yet is never anything less than a scintillating, page-turning read."—Gary Shteyngart

"A wrenching, tightly woven story about many kinds of love and many kinds of violence.ĚýSpeak No EvilĚýprobes deeply but also with compassion the cruelties of a loving home. Iweala’s characters confront you in close-up, as viscerally, bodily alive as any in contemporary fiction."—Larissa MacFarquhar

In the long-anticipated novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Beasts of No Nation, a revelation shared between two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds sets off a chain of events with devastating consequences.

On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he’s a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer—an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders—and the one person who seems not to judge him.

When his father accidentally discovers Niru is gay, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, Meredith finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding toward a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed.

In the tradition of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Speak No Evil explores what it means to be different in a fundamentally conformist society and how that difference plays out in our inner and outer struggles. It is a novel about the power of words and self-identification, about who gets to speak and who has the power to speak for other people. As heart-wrenching and timely as his breakout debut, Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’sĚýsecond novel cuts to the core of our humanity and leaves us reeling in its wake.

A 2018 Indie Next Pick | One ofĚýThe Millionsâ€� Most Anticipated Books of 2018 | One of Bustle’s 35 Most Anticipated Fiction Books Of 2018Ěý| One ofĚýPaste'sĚý25 Most Anticipated Books of 2018 | One ofĚýThe Boston Globe’s 25 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 ]]>
240 Uzodinma Iweala 0061284939 Will 4 3.81 2018 Speak No Evil
author: Uzodinma Iweala
name: Will
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)]]> 20410192 Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.

The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers � they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding � but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.]]>
210 Jeff VanderMeer 0374710775 Will 5 3.81 2014 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Will
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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We Can Only Save Ourselves 53327884 With echoes of The Virgin Suicides and The Fates Will Find Their Way, Alison Wisdom’s debut novel is the story of one teenage girl’s unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit community she leaves behind.

Alice Lange’s neighbors are proud to know her—a high-achieving student, cheerleader, and all-around good citizen, she’s a perfect emblem of their sunny neighborhood. The night before she’s expected to be crowned Homecoming Queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, then disappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in another part of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding the shackles of conformity.

At the bungalow, however, she learns that four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have already followed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesley’s demands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cooker—until one day they reach the point of no return.

Back home, the story of Alice’s disappearance and radicalization is framed by the first-person plural chorus of the mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tear she made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: Isn’t suburbia a kind of cult unto itself?

Combining the sharp social critique of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty of Emma Cline’s The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writer to watch.]]>
336 Alison Wisdom 0062996142 Will 0 to-read 3.30 2021 We Can Only Save Ourselves
author: Alison Wisdom
name: Will
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
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<![CDATA[The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump]]> 37848398 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •ĚýFrom the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic comes an impassioned critique of America’s retreat from reasonWe live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the occupants of the White House. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.ĚýHow did truth become an endangered species in contemporary America? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and politics, Kakutani identifies the trends—originating on both the right and the left—that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.ĚýWith remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and points toward a new path for our truth-challenged times.]]> 190 Michiko Kakutani 0525574840 Will 4 4.02 2018 The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
author: Michiko Kakutani
name: Will
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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Homesick for Another World 32726388 A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017

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

"I can’t recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I’m shocked and scandalized. She’s brilliant, this young woman."—David Sedaris

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.

And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.]]>
283 Ottessa Moshfegh Will 5 3.70 2017 Homesick for Another World
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Will
average rating: 3.70
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rating: 5
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We the Animals 12359041 An award-winning novel in stories surrounding a young, half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy grappling with life, love, and identity as he comes of age.

In this groundbreaking debut, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.

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156 Justin Torres Will 4 3.79 2011 We the Animals
author: Justin Torres
name: Will
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The Postman Always Rings Twice]]> 9768940
First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside, and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger.]]>
116 James M. Cain Will 4 3.87 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice
author: James M. Cain
name: Will
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1934
rating: 4
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Dracula 17245 You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

This Norton Critical Edition includes a rich selection of background and source materials in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.

Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.]]>
488 Bram Stoker 0393970124 Will 4 4.02 1897 Dracula
author: Bram Stoker
name: Will
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1897
rating: 4
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The Savage Detectives 19735331
The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time� (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.]]>
578 Roberto Bolaño Will 5 3.83 1998 The Savage Detectives
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Will
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/01
date added: 2020/08/01
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The Voyeur's Motel 29898574 The controversial chronicle of a motel owner who secretly studied the sex lives of his guests by the renowned journalist and author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife.On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestsellerĚýThy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. “Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,â€� the letter began, “I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.â€� The man—Gerald Foos—hen divulged an astonishing he had bought a motel outside Denver for the express purpose of satisfying his voyeuristic desires. Underneath its peaked roof, he had built an “observation platformâ€� through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests.Over the years, Foos sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. Through his Voyeur’s motel, he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. In The Voyeur’s Motel. “the reader observes Talese observing Foos observing his guests.â€� An extraordinary work of narrative journalism, it is at once an examination of one unsettling man and a portrait of the secret life of the American heartland over the latter half of the twentieth century (Daily Mail, UK).“This is a weird book about weird people doing weird things, and I wouldn’t have put it down if the house were on fire.â€� —John Greenya,ĚýWashington Times]]> 210 Gay Talese 0802189733 Will 2 3.36 2016 The Voyeur's Motel
author: Gay Talese
name: Will
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2020/07/03
date added: 2020/07/03
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A Man 49882394
Akira Kido is a divorce attorney whose own marriage is in danger of being destroyed by emotional disconnect. With a midlife crisis looming, Kido’s life is upended by the reemergence of a former client, Rié Takemoto. She wants Kido to investigate a dead man—her recently deceased husband, Daisuké. Upon his death she discovered that he’d been living a lie. His name, his past, his entire identity belonged to someone else, a total stranger. The investigation draws Kido into two intriguing mysteries: finding out who Rié’s husband really was and discovering more about the man he pretended to be. Soon, with each new revelation, Kido will come to share the obsession with—and the lure of—erasing one life to create a new one.

In A Man, winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, Keiichiro Hirano explores the search for identity, the ambiguity of memory, the legacies with which we live and die, and the reconciliation of who you hoped to be with who you’ve actually become.]]>
303 KeiichirĹŤ Hirano 1542006864 Will 4 3.94 2018 A Man
author: KeiichirĹŤ Hirano
name: Will
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/30
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When You Disappeared 34884315
Catherine knows Simon must be in trouble. He wouldn't just leave her. He wouldn't leave the children.

But Simon knows the truth - about why he left and what he's done. He knows things about his marriage that it would kill Catherine to find out. The memories she holds onto are lies.

While Catherine faces a dark new reality at home, Simon's halfway around the world, alive and thriving. He's doing whatever it takes to stay one step ahead of the truth.

But he can't hide forever, and when he reappears twenty-five years later, Catherine will finally learn who he is.

And wish she'd stayed in the dark.

Revised edition: Previously published as The Wronged Sons, this edition of When You Disappeared includes editorial revisions.]]>
349 John Marrs 1477828834 Will 2 3.94 2013 When You Disappeared
author: John Marrs
name: Will
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2020/06/23
date added: 2020/06/23
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An Ocean of Minutes 38896031 The Time Traveler’s Wife and Station Eleven, a sweeping literary love story about two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart.

America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded laborer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.

An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story about the endurance and complexity of human relationships and the cost of holding onto the past—and the price of letting it go.]]>
321 Thea Lim Will 5 3.40 2018 An Ocean of Minutes
author: Thea Lim
name: Will
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/13
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<![CDATA[The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure]]> 36556202
First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade.

This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.]]>
352 Jonathan Haidt 0735224900 Will 3 4.23 2018 The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Will
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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The Lost Weekend 18920301
It is 1936, and on the East Side of Manhattan, a would-be writer named Don Birnam decides to have a drink.ĚýAnd then another, and then another, until he’s in the midst of what becomes a five-day binge. The Lost Weekend moves with unstoppable speed, propelled by a heartbreaking but unflinching truth. It catapulted Charles Jackson to fame, and endures as an acute study of the ravages of alcoholism, as well as an unforgettable parable of the condition of the modern man.]]>
274 Charles R. Jackson Will 5 4.23 1944 The Lost Weekend
author: Charles R. Jackson
name: Will
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1944
rating: 5
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The Goldfinch 18902634
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]>
774 Donna Tartt Will 4 4.03 2013 The Goldfinch
author: Donna Tartt
name: Will
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/08
date added: 2020/06/08
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I liked this pretty well, though I can’t help but think that if it were half as long, it might be twice as good.
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True Grit 43612456 Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost writers. True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and became the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and, in 2010, a new version starring Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers. True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the killer into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.]]> 228 Charles Portis Will 5 4.47 1968 True Grit
author: Charles Portis
name: Will
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1968
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy]]> 40936557 What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?

"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.

Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.

Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.]]>
255 Michael Lewis 1324002654 Will 3 4.26 2018 The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy
author: Michael Lewis
name: Will
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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The Collector 18892522 "A superb novel...Evil has seldom been so sinister." --TimeHailed as the first modern psychological thriller, The Collector is the internationally bestselling novel that catapulted John Fowles into the front rank of contemporary novelists. This tale of obsessive love--the story of a lonely clerk who collects butterflies and of the beautiful young art student who is his ultimate quarry--remains unparalleled in its power to startle and mesmerize."A bravura first novel...As a horror story, this book is a remarkable tour de force." --New Yorker]]> 272 John Fowles 0316230200 Will 5 3.74 1963 The Collector
author: John Fowles
name: Will
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/24
date added: 2020/04/26
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Wanderers 42445130 A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world's last hope. In the tradition of The Stand and Station Eleven comes a gripping saga that weaves an epic tapestry of humanity into an astonishing tale of survival.

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and are sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For on their journey, they will discover an America convulsed with terror and violence, where this apocalyptic epidemic proves less dangerous than the fear of it. As the rest of society collapses all around them--and an ultraviolent militia threatens to exterminate them--the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart--or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.]]>
800 Chuck Wendig Will 3 4.11 2019 Wanderers
author: Chuck Wendig
name: Will
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/19
date added: 2020/04/19
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<![CDATA[Agents of Dreamland (Tinfoil Dossier, #1)]]> 31684693
In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible � the Children of the Next Level � and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from â€otherâ€� sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.

And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.]]>
82 CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan 0765394316 Will 4 3.82 2017 Agents of Dreamland (Tinfoil Dossier, #1)
author: CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan
name: Will
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/11
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The Peripheral (Jackpot #1) 22010718 William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010’s New York Times–b±đ˛őłŮ˛ő±đ±ô±ôľ±˛Ô˛µ Zero History.


Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job Flynne didn’t know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That’s all there is to it. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.
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496 William Gibson 0698170709 Will 3 4.14 2014 The Peripheral (Jackpot #1)
author: William Gibson
name: Will
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/09
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The Elementary Particles 58314 The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.

Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.]]>
272 Michel Houellebecq 0375727019 Will 3 3.91 1998 The Elementary Particles
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Will
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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The Subprimes 23752442 A wickedly funny dystopian parody set in a financially apocalyptic future America, from the critically acclaimed author of Triburbia

In a future America that feels increasingly familiar, you are your credit score. Extreme wealth inequality has created a class of have-nothings: Subprimes. Their bad credit ratings make them unemployable. Jobless and without assets, they've walked out on mortgages, been foreclosed upon, or can no longer afford a fixed address. Fugitives who must keep moving to avoid arrest, they wander the globally warmed American wasteland searching for day labor and a place to park their battered SUVs for the night.

Karl Taro Greenfeld's trenchant satire follows the fortunes of two families whose lives reflect this new dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-financially-fittest America. Desperate for work and food, a Subprime family has been forced to migrate east, hoping for a better life. They are soon joined in their odyssey by a writer and his family—slightly better off, yet falling fast. Eventually, they discover a small settlement of Subprimes who have begun an agrarian utopia built on a foreclosed exurb. Soon, though, the little stability they have is threatened when their land is targeted by job creators for shale oil extraction.

But all is not lost. A hero emerges, a woman on a motorcycle—suspiciously lacking a credit score—who just may save the world.

In The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfeld turns his keen and unflinching eye to our country today—and where we may be headed. The result is a novel for the 99 percent: a darkly funny comedy about paradise lost and found, the value of credit, economic policy, and the meaning of family.]]>
320 Karl Taro Greenfeld Will 2 3.68 2015 The Subprimes
author: Karl Taro Greenfeld
name: Will
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[Summer of Deliverance : A Memoir of Father and Son]]> 1055691 288 Christopher Dickey 0684842025 Will 5 3.92 1998 Summer of Deliverance : A Memoir of Father and Son
author: Christopher Dickey
name: Will
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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The Ditch 42041747 The bracing and inventive new novel of suspicions and secrecy from Herman Koch, the New York Times bestselling author of The Dinner

When Robert Walter, popular mayor of Amsterdam, sees his wife toss her head back with laughter while chatting to one of his aldermen at a New Year's reception, he immediately suspects the worst. Despite their long and happy marriage, Robert is convinced that Sylvia is cheating on him - with the respectable alderman who is dedicated to the environment, no less. The man that wants to spoil the capital's skyline with wind turbines.

Robert and Sylvia have a daughter, Diana. The New Year's reception marks the end of the "happy family" era that the mayor has enjoyed for so long. His wife and daughter, however, are not aware of his suspicions, and carry on as usual. Robert starts spending a lot of time and energy 'behaving normally'. Naturally, his normal behavior is far more suspicious. Normally he's not really present when he's at home - he's preoccupied with his phone, the newspapers and his own thoughts. But now he's so sure he'll miss the clues if he doesn't pay attention, that he starts to be almost alarmingly attentive and interested--ultimately losing himself in increasingly panicked, and paranoid, trains of thought.

Written with Herman Koch's trademark originality, playfulness, and edge, THE DITCH is a wildly clever--and guttingly familiar--story of a man whose sadistic skill for undermining himself and his marriage comes to cost him nearly everything.]]>
320 Herman Koch 0525572384 Will 3 3.02 2016 The Ditch
author: Herman Koch
name: Will
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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The Institute 43798285
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King's gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good versus evil in a world where the good guys don't always win.
--front flap]]>
561 Stephen King Will 3 4.17 2019 The Institute
author: Stephen King
name: Will
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 3
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<![CDATA[Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style]]> 40063024 A witty, informative guide to writing "good English" from Random House's longtime copy chief and one of Twitter's leading enforcers of proper grammar--a twenty-first-century Elements of Style

As authoritative as it is amusing, this book distills everything Benjamin Dreyer has learned from the hundreds of books he has copyedited, including works by Elizabeth Strout, E. L. Doctorow, and Frank Rich, into a useful guide not just for writers but for everyone who wants to put their best foot forward in writing prose. Dreyer offers lessons on the ins and outs of punctuation and grammar, including how to navigate the words he calls "the confusables," like tricky homophones; the myriad ways to use (and misuse) a comma; and how to recognize--though not necessarily do away with--the passive voice. (Hint: If you can plausibly add "by zombies" to the end of a sentence, it's passive.)

People are sharing their writing more than ever--on blogs, on Twitter--and this book lays out, clearly and comprehensibly, everything writers can do to keep readers focused on the real reason writers write: to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively. Chock-full of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts on the rules (and non-rules) of English, this book will prove invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who spend their time editing and shaping other people's prose, and--perhaps best of all--an utter treat for anyone who simply revels in language.]]>
269 Benjamin Dreyer 0812995708 Will 5 4.34 2019 Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
author: Benjamin Dreyer
name: Will
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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Exhalation 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]>
368 Ted Chiang Will 5 4.27 2019 Exhalation
author: Ted Chiang
name: Will
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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The Job of the Wasp 36481935 confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that’s when the corpses start turning up.

A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and an obsessive murder mystery all-in-one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence.]]>
208 Colin Winnette Will 4 2.95 2018 The Job of the Wasp
author: Colin Winnette
name: Will
average rating: 2.95
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/31
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<![CDATA[Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt]]> 20639917
"Guaranteed to make blood boil." —Janet Maslin, New York Times

In Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together—some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries—to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.]]>
323 Michael Lewis 0393244679 Will 4 4.30 2014 Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
author: Michael Lewis
name: Will
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/29
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<![CDATA[The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds]]> 35631386
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.]]>
368 Michael Lewis 0393354776 Will 3 3.95 2016 The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
author: Michael Lewis
name: Will
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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Catherine, Called Birdy 24137 "Corpus Bones! I utterly loathe my life."

Catherine feels trapped. Her father is determined to marry her off to a rich man--any rich man, no matter how awful.

But by wit, trickery, and luck, Catherine manages to send several would-be husbands packing. Then a shaggy-bearded suitor from the north comes to call--by far the oldest, ugliest, most revolting suitor of them all.

Unfortunately, he is also the richest.

Can a sharp-tongued, high-spirited, clever young maiden with a mind of her own actually lose the battle against an ill-mannered, piglike lord and an unimaginative, greedy toad of a father?

Deus! Not if Catherine has anything to say about it!

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224 Karen Cushman 0060739428 Will 4 3.73 1994 Catherine, Called Birdy
author: Karen Cushman
name: Will
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1994
rating: 4
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The Postman 889284 This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth.

A timeless novel as urgently compelling as Warday or Alas, Babylon, David Brin's The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.

He was a survivor—a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war.ĚýFate touches him one chill winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold.ĚýThe old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.]]>
321 David Brin 0553278746 Will 2 3.89 1985 The Postman
author: David Brin
name: Will
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1985
rating: 2
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The Sisters Brothers 11329900 Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn’t share his brother’s appetite for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. But their prey isn’t an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.

ĚýWith The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne’er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

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281 Patrick deWitt Will 5 3.94 2011 The Sisters Brothers
author: Patrick deWitt
name: Will
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2019/10/19
date added: 2019/10/19
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Phaedrus (Hackett Classics) 360882 144 Plato 0872202208 Will 5 3.98 -370 Phaedrus (Hackett Classics)
author: Plato
name: Will
average rating: 3.98
book published: -370
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches]]> 553758 564 Mark Twain 1594622531 Will 4 3.79 The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches
author: Mark Twain
name: Will
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/09/13
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Limitless 10796211 351 Alan Glynn Will 3 3.95 2001 Limitless
author: Alan Glynn
name: Will
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2019/09/11
date added: 2019/09/11
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<![CDATA[Down and Out in Paris and London]]> 9045942 From the author of 1984,ĚýGeorge Orwell narratesĚýthe journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in thisĚýsobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society.
Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes in vivid detail the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes in the kitchens of posh French restaurants. In London, he encounters the disturbing world of the unhoused and charitable shelters. His adventures conniving landlords and negotiating with pawnshops as he searches for work, food, and lodging are told without self-pity and often with humor. Ěý]]>
225 George Orwell 0547488548 Will 4 4.13 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London
author: George Orwell
name: Will
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/25
date added: 2019/08/25
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The World According to Garp 7069 610 John Irving 0345915593 Will 3 4.11 1978 The World According to Garp
author: John Irving
name: Will
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/11
date added: 2019/08/13
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Dry 40193421 324 Augusten Burroughs Will 4 4.29 2003 Dry
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Will
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/30
date added: 2019/07/30
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Earthly Paradise 1738338 512 Colette Gauthier-Villars 0140038515 Will 0 to-read 4.28 1953 Earthly Paradise
author: Colette Gauthier-Villars
name: Will
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/25
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<![CDATA[Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis]]> 38358610 From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class through the author’s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In HillbillyElegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.

The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love� and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

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274 J.D. Vance 0062872257 Will 3 4.20 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
author: J.D. Vance
name: Will
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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The Dinner 40718205 Alternate cover edition can be found here

An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives - all over the course of one meal.

It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.]]>
306 Herman Koch Will 4 3.19 2009 The Dinner
author: Herman Koch
name: Will
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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Bad Behavior 251356 Emperor of the Air has there been such excitement surrounding a debut short-story collection.

Daisy's valentine --
A romantic weekend --
something nice --
An affair, edited --
Connection --
Trying to be --
Secretary --
Other factors --
Heaven]]>
208 Mary Gaitskill Will 4 3.90 1988 Bad Behavior
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Will
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1988
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories]]> 382950
This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen —familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House —encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.

A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure.

Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.]]>
340 Jim Shepard 1400033497 Will 5 4.01 2004 Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories
author: Jim Shepard
name: Will
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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Little Children 37426 355 Tom Perrotta 0312315732 Will 3 3.63 2004 Little Children
author: Tom Perrotta
name: Will
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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The Abstinence Teacher 347143
That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground. (p. 11)

Thanks to an off-hand remark made during a class discussion of oral sex, sex-ed teacher Ruth Ramsey finds herself a target of the Christian evangelicals who are increasingly influencing the schoolboard of suburban Stonewood Heights. Forced to attend remedial sessions with a smug “Virginity Consultant,� Ruth is isolated and alone, caught in the polarized red-versus-blue landscape of present-day American suburbia. It’s like “living in a horror movie,� she thinks, � The Invasion of the Body Snatchers , or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.� Divorced and sharing custody of her daughters with her ex, and sometimes attempting a futile date, Ruth spends many a lonely weekend wondering how her bleak existence came to be.

Then one morning at her daughter’s soccer game, Ruth meets Tim Mason, a cute forty-something volunteer coach. Ruth feels an instant attraction to Tim, but when he draws the girls together for a spontaneous prayer circle after the game, she angrily yanks her daughter away from the proceedings, placing herself once again in the sights of the evangelicals.

But Ruth has another unexpected she can’t seem to get a handle on Tim, her supposed adversary, who keeps appearing at her front door. A recovering addict whose bottoming-out cost him his home and his marriage, Tim found his way to the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth through the intervention of Pastor Dennis, the charismatic preacher who put Tim’s shattered life back together in an approximation of happiness. Thanks to Pastor Dennis, Tim is now married to Carrie, a fellow Tabernacler who is attractive and attentive, if robotic. He plays guitar at the weekly prayer sessions in a sanitized reenactment of his days in a Grateful Dead cover band. He holds a respectable if unfulfilling job as a loan officer, well aware of the irony of the post for a man with his history. He is grateful for the help he has received from his church community and Pastor Dennis. But he can’t shake the yearning for something more, and a nagging attraction to that troublesome sex-ed teacher....

With The Abstinence Teacher , Tom Perrotta wades into the murky waters of contemporary American suburbia, fully deploying his proven gift for describing the panic lurking beneath its seemingly placid surface. Already widely known to book and movie audiences for his scathing satire mixed with remarkable compassion in works including Election and Little Children (both adapted for film, Little Children garnering Perrotta an Oscar nomination), this novel once again proves, as declared by the Los Angeles Times , “Perrotta’s balance of humor and pathos has no equal.”]]>
368 Tom Perrotta 0307356361 Will 4 3.25 2007 The Abstinence Teacher
author: Tom Perrotta
name: Will
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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Educated 35133922
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.]]>
352 Tara Westover 0399590501 Will 5 4.46 2018 Educated
author: Tara Westover
name: Will
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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what made maddie run 41043489 *Instant New York Times Bestseller*

The #1 New York Times Monthly Sports and Fitness bestseller

From noted ESPN commentator and journalist Kate Fagan, the heartbreaking and vital story of college athlete Madison Holleran, whose death by suicide rocked the University of Pennsylvania campus and whose life reveals with haunting detail and uncommon understanding the struggle of young people suffering from mental illness today.




If you scrolled through the Instagram feed of 19-year-old Maddy Holleran, you would see a perfect life: a freshman at an Ivy League school, recruited for the track team, who was also beautiful, popular, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started.

But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something changed. Previously indefatigable Maddy became withdrawn, and her thoughts centered on how she could change her life. In spite of thousands of hours of practice and study, she contemplated transferring from the school that had once been her dream. When Maddy's dad, Jim, dropped her off for the first day of spring semester, she held him a second longer than usual. That would be the last time Jim would see his daughter.

WHAT MADE MADDY RUN began as a piece that Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, wrote about Maddy's life. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also struggling with mental illness. This is the story of Maddy Holleran's life, and her struggle with depression, which also reveals the mounting pressures young people, and college athletes in particular, face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.]]>
Kate Fagan Will 4 4.20 2017 what made maddie run
author: Kate Fagan
name: Will
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[If at Birth You Don't Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny]]> 25666058 If at Birth You Don't Succeed, with an admission: he botched his own birth. Two months early, underweight and under-prepared for life, he entered the world with cerebral palsy and an uncertain future. So how did this hairless mole-rat of a boy blossom into a viral internet sensation who's hosted two travel shows, impressed Oprah, driven the Mars Rover, and inspired a John Mayer song? (It wasn't Your Body is a Wonderland.)

Zach lives by the mantra: when life gives you wheelchair, make lemonade. Whether recounting a valiant childhood attempt to woo Cindy Crawford, encounters with zealous faith healers, or the time he crapped his pants mere feet from Dr. Phil, Zach shares his fumbles with unflinching honesty and characteristic charm. By his thirtieth birthday, Zach had grown into an adult with a career in entertainment, millions of fans, a loving family, and friends who would literally carry him up mountains.

If at Birth You Don't Succeed is a hilariously irreverent and heartfelt memoir about finding your passion and your path even when it's paved with epic misadventure. This is the unlikely but not unlucky story of a man who couldn't safely open a bag of Skittles, but still became a fitness guru with fans around the world. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll fall in love with the Olive Garden all over again, and learn why cerebral palsy is, definitively, "the sexiest of the palsies."]]>
338 Zach Anner 162779364X Will 4 4.01 2016 If at Birth You Don't Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny
author: Zach Anner
name: Will
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 4
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The Diary of a Young Girl 48855
In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annexe� of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.
--back cover]]>
283 Anne Frank Will 5 4.19 1947 The Diary of a Young Girl
author: Anne Frank
name: Will
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1947
rating: 5
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Reservoir 13 34146665 Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a tragedy refuse to subside.]]> 291 Jon McGregor 1936787709 Will 0 to-read 3.52 2017 Reservoir 13
author: Jon McGregor
name: Will
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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A Drinking Life 79107 This bestselling memoir from a seasoned New York City reporter is "a vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction" (New York Times).
As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory.
In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.

"Magnificent. A Drinking Life is about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink." --Boston Globe]]>
265 Pete Hamill 0316341029 Will 3 3.92 A Drinking Life
author: Pete Hamill
name: Will
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 3
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The Outrun 35187182 312 Amy Liptrot 0393355594 Will 3 3.95 2015 The Outrun
author: Amy Liptrot
name: Will
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 3
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<![CDATA[The Best American Short Stories 2018]]> 37569319
“I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,� writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018 , “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.� The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”]]>
352 Roxane Gay 0544582888 Will 5 3.99 2018 The Best American Short Stories 2018
author: Roxane Gay
name: Will
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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The Family Fang 12389607
Annie and Buster Fang have spent most of their adult lives trying to distance themselves from their famous artist parents, Caleb and Camille. But when a bad economy and a few bad personal decisions converge, the two siblings have nowhere to turn but their family home. Reunited under one roof for the first time in more than a decade and surrounded by the souvenirs of their unusual upbringing, Buster and Annie are forced to confront not only their creatively ambitious parents, but the chaos and confusion of their childhood.

Basis for the major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Jason Bateman and Christopher Walken.]]>
309 Kevin Wilson 006157905X Will 3 3.65 2011 The Family Fang
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Will
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2011
rating: 3
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<![CDATA[The Life List of Adrian Mandrick]]> 35297250 H Is for Hawk meets Grief Is the Thing with Feathers in this evocative debut novel about a pill-popping anesthesiologist and avid birder who embarks on a quest to find one of the world’s rarest species, allowing nothing to get in his way—until he’s forced to confront his obsessions and what they’ve cost him.

Anesthesiologist Adrian Mandrick is filled with contradictory impulses. He wants to be a good husband to his wife and a good father to his children; he wants to forgive his once-beloved mother for the crime she committed and the long lost father who accused her. But when he receives a call from his mother after years of silence, he takes solace in the very pain medication he prescribes, spiraling downward into addiction.

His sole source of true comfort is his “life list”—the all-encompassing record of the 863 bird species he’s spotted and identified. His is the third longest list in all of North America. But when Henry Lassiter, the legendary birder who held the region’s second longest list, dies suddenly, Adrian seizes the opportunity to make his way to the very top. A desperate search for the extremely rare Ivory-billed Woodpecker eventually leaves him stranded in the thick swamplands of Florida’s panhandle, where he is forced to confront his past and present failures, to reflect on what his obsessions and addictions have cost him, and to question what is truly important in his life.

Combining wry humor and mystery with environmental adventure, The Life List of Adrian Mandrick is a fast-paced, engaging story that heralds the arrival of a new literary talent.]]>
275 Chris White 1501174304 Will 2 3.53 2018 The Life List of Adrian Mandrick
author: Chris White
name: Will
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2018
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo]]> 30971622
When Silas Van Loy flees home on horseback to avoid capture for his brother’s murder, he is soon followed by both the police and his brother’s wife, Lena, who is intent on exacting revenge. She reluctantly lets her trusted stable assistant join her on a journey across the wilds of Northern California in the hopes of catching Silas for one final showdown. Stansel follows the chase and shares the story of the brothersâ€� rise from hardscrabble childhood to their reign as the region’s preeminent horse trainers, tracking the tense sibling rivalry that ultimately leads to the elder’s death.ĚýĚý

A fully realized tale that challenges notions of the modern West, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo will satisfy fans of Kent Haruf, Larry McMurtry, Molly Gloss, and Smith Henderson, and establish Stansel as a new voice in this grand tradition.]]>
192 Ian Stansel 0544963393 Will 5 3.69 2017 The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo
author: Ian Stansel
name: Will
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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