Emile's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 12 Mar 2025 13:20:17 -0700 60 Emile's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance]]> 75665932
An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government

Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story.

What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land , Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today.

With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.]]> 352 Rebecca Clarren 0593655079 Emile 0 to-read 4.45 2023 The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance
author: Rebecca Clarren
name: Emile
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> When Women Were Dragons 58783802 A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.]]> 367 Kelly Barnhill 0385548222 Emile 0 to-read 3.79 2022 When Women Were Dragons
author: Kelly Barnhill
name: Emile
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> Swordheart 57580085 Return to the world of Clockwork Boys in this all-new novel from T. Kingfisher!

Halla is a housekeeper who has suddenly inherited her great-uncle's estate...and, unfortunately, his relatives. Sarkis is an immortal swordsman trapped in a prison of enchanted steel. When Halla draws the sword that imprisons him, Sarkis finds himself attempting to defend his new wielder against everything from bandits and roving inquisitors to her own in-laws...and the sword itself may prove to be the greatest threat of all....

Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins]]> 15 T. Kingfisher 1705297714 Emile 0
The plot had a bit of that "this is a D&D campaign turned into a novel" feel to it to me as well.]]> 4.00 2018 Swordheart
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Emile
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/27
date added: 2025/03/06
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review:
Not my favorite T. Kingfisher. It felt to me like a YA fantasy novel that I quite enjoyed (but with a middle aged widowed protagonist, which is an unusual choice for YA), with a stock genre romance bolted on that left me totally unmoved.

The plot had a bit of that "this is a D&D campaign turned into a novel" feel to it to me as well.
]]> Going Dark (Silo 49, #1) 18243310
Silo 49 has never had it easy and things have just gotten a whole lot worse. Graham, the head of IT, has done many unsavory things in his life but everyone has a line they won't cross. He just found his. With only his best friend, Wallis and a dying electrician, Grace, to stand by him, he is left with one clear and final choice. Does he do what is right or what the rules say he should? It is a race against time for the trio against the impersonal might of Silo One. Their only choice? Going Dark.]]> 110 Ann Christy Emile 0 to-read 3.93 2013 Going Dark (Silo 49, #1)
author: Ann Christy
name: Emile
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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review:

]]> Surviving Autocracy 50695164 A bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist's essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery--or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.]]> 288 Masha Gessen 0593188934 Emile 0 to-read 4.15 2020 Surviving Autocracy
author: Masha Gessen
name: Emile
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals]]> 45037962 230 Aurora Levins Morales 1478003375 Emile 0 to-read 4.82 Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals
author: Aurora Levins Morales
name: Emile
average rating: 4.82
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> Human Acts 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 Emile 0 to-read 4.26 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Emile
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning]]> 11107324
Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.]]> 304 Maggie Nelson 0393072150 Emile 0 to-read 4.22 2011 The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Emile
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> The Sentence 219730560 What if you’ve been frozen in stasis for a hundred years for a crime you may or may not have committed?

An impoverished young man, Jagat, is found guilty of murder. For his crime, he is sentenced to the highest form of punishment—the sleep of death for a century, with the promise of revival should his innocence ever be proven.

But his act sparks a bloody conflict in the great city of Peruma, with the Commune, an anarchist collective of workers, revolting against the Council, which has ruled Peruma for four hundred years. Drained by a war without end, Council and Commune negotiate a hundred-year treaty that is to be enforced by an impartial body: the guardians of the Confederation.

And now, a century later, the Charter is a week away from lapsing. Tensions run high in Peruma. As an uncertain future looms, Nila, a young guardian, is approached by a mysterious woman who insists that Jagat’s case be reopened before it’s too late. Drawn by the prospect of undoing a possible historical injustice at a fraught time, Nila agrees. But as she begins to unearth the past, forces, known and unknown, thwart her at every turn.

What secrets does the city hold? Who is working in the shadows against her—and why? What is the price of resurrecting a martyr? The Sentence raises questions of justice, rights and ethics that will echo in your mind long after you’ve turned the last page.]]> 396 Gautam Bhatia 9360451525 Emile 0 to-read 4.43 The Sentence
author: Gautam Bhatia
name: Emile
average rating: 4.43
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945]]> 58999265 Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.


Taking us from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, Resistance reveals why and how small bands of individuals undertook actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the destruction of their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were ordinary people who would not have been expected—even by themselves—to become heroes. Simultaneously panoramic and heartbreakingly intimate, Resistance is an incomparable history necessary for any home library.]]> 960 Halik Kochanski 1324091657 Emile 0 to-read 4.04 2022 Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
author: Halik Kochanski
name: Emile
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> The Scientist and the Church 25952832
The articles collected in this volume outline the general contours of their approach, flesh out some of their recent research and offer personal insights into the broader politics of their journey. The first chapters reexamine the common foundations of the neoclassical and Marxist doctrines, sketch the contours of the authors� alternative cosmology of capitalized power, identify the asymptotes � or limits � of this power and explore the all-encompassing logic of modern finance. Subsequent chapters research the connection between redistribution and cyclical crises, reassess the Marxist nexus between imperialism and financialism, rethink the oft-misunderstood role of crime and punishment in the capitalist mode of power and articulate a new theory and history of Middle-East energy conflicts. The closing chapters include two big-picture interviews, as well as riveting reflections on the authors� own scientific clashes with the church.]]> 323 Shimshon Bichler Emile 0 to-read 3.00 2015 The Scientist and the Church
author: Shimshon Bichler
name: Emile
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy Book 16)]]> 18987226
This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape � or creorder � their society.

Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as powerâ€� and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of powerâ€�.]]> 466 Jonathan Nitzan Emile 0 to-read 4.20 2009 Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy Book 16)
author: Jonathan Nitzan
name: Emile
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Gogmagog (The Chronicles of Ludwich #1)]]> 154433984
Past plants on the mud-flats that send up brief, man-shaped clouds of seeds to lure you out, past shanty towns full of old sailors and pilots scraping a living from the dregs of the passenger trade, between the wicker effigies in the Wodwo graveyards this is a journey at once familiar from folk tales and country customs and utterly strange and alien.

Cady, back on her boat and feeling every day of her 1,600 years; the tight-lipped but beautiful little girl and her rubber-stitched-faced, mechanical companion are an odd but warmly imagined and compelling cast to accompany the reader on a quest into a world of mysteries and terrors that leave the reader with an inkling that this world is perhaps more familiar than it first appears.

Can Cady find her youth again?]]> 333 Jeff Noon Emile 0 to-read 3.64 2024 Gogmagog (The Chronicles of Ludwich #1)
author: Jeff Noon
name: Emile
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)]]> 61294937 Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City of Brass, spins a new trilogy of magic and mayhem on the high seas in this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artifacts and ancient mysteries, in one woman’s determined quest to seize a final chance at glory—and write her own legend.

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.

But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will.

Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power
and the price might be your very soul.]]> 483 Shannon Chakraborty Emile 0 to-read 4.25 2023 The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)
author: Shannon Chakraborty
name: Emile
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> Automatic Noodle 217388015 From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.

While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad serviceâ€� reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?]]> 176 Annalee Newitz 1250357462 Emile 0 to-read 4.16 2025 Automatic Noodle
author: Annalee Newitz
name: Emile
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict]]> 10056014
Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment.

Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.]]> 320 Erica Chenoweth 0231156820 Emile 0 to-read 4.00 2011 Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
author: Erica Chenoweth
name: Emile
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance (a Camera Obscura book)]]> 207987162 Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this sociopolitical movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.]]> 328 Zahra Stardust 1478031069 Emile 0 to-read 4.80 Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance (a Camera Obscura book)
author: Zahra Stardust
name: Emile
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Black Critique)]]> 57550125
In a time of movements like Black Lives Matter and concepts like anti-racism, it’s more important than ever to look at earlier movements for lessons and inspiration. Anarchism and the Black Revolution is must reading for activists and academics alike.

Anarchism and the Black Revolution first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979. Now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic written by a key figure of the Civil Rights movement is republished with a wealth of original material for a new generation.

Anarchist theory has long suffered from a whiteness problem. This book places its critique of both capitalism and racism firmly at the center of the text. Subjects

*Capitalism and an analysis of white supremacy
*Anarchism defined
*Anarchist versus Marxist
*Capitalism, the state, and private property
*The anarchist case against representative government
*Anarchism and the black revolution
*And more!

Making a powerful case for the building of a Black revolutionary movement that rejects sexism, homophobia, militarism and racism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin counters the lies and distortions about anarchism spread by its left-wing and right-wing opponents alike.

New material for this edition includes an interview with writer and activist William C. Anderson, as well as new essays, and a contextualizing biography of the author's inspiring life.]]> 232 Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin 0745345816 Emile 0 to-read 4.28 1994 Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Black Critique)
author: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
name: Emile
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery]]> 434707 188 Imre Lakatos 0521290384 Emile 0 to-read 4.29 1976 Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
author: Imre Lakatos
name: Emile
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Life-Giving Sword: Kazuo Chiba's Life in Aikido]]> 48947700 539 Liese Klein 1696063434 Emile 0 to-read 4.50 The Life-Giving Sword: Kazuo Chiba's Life in Aikido
author: Liese Klein
name: Emile
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming]]> 22800567
Many experienced programmers try to bend Python to fit patterns they learned from other languages, and never discover Python features outside of their experience. With this book, those Python programmers will thoroughly learn how to become proficient in Python 3.

This book covers:



Python data model: understand how special methods are the key to the consistent behavior of objects

Data structures: take full advantage of built-in types, and understand the text vs bytes duality in the Unicode age

Functions as objects: view Python functions as first-class objects, and understand how this affects popular design patterns

Object-oriented idioms: build classes by learning about references, mutability, interfaces, operator overloading, and multiple inheritance

Control flow: leverage context managers, generators, coroutines, and concurrency with the concurrent.futures and asyncio packages

Metaprogramming: understand how properties, attribute descriptors, class decorators, and metaclasses work
"]]> 790 Luciano Ramalho 1491946008 Emile 0 to-read 4.62 2015 Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming
author: Luciano Ramalho
name: Emile
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Classic Computer Science Problems in Python]]> 42103309 224 David Kopec 1617295981 Emile 0 to-read 3.68 Classic Computer Science Problems in Python
author: David Kopec
name: Emile
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School]]> 34664642 A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.]]> 240 Carla Shalaby 1620972379 Emile 5
Because it does such a good job looking at 4 examples of how children come to be constructed as trouble makers, and how that is an identity not inherent in a child but in the relationship between a child and a particular social environment, it makes me dearly wish that one more example had been included: a "troublemaker" from, say, a Sudbury Valley school or some other free/democratic school which is explicitly positioning itself as a response to the kind of hidden curriculum that Troublemakers is illuminating. Because the problems of getting lots of humans to conform themselves to each other, to get along in a big group day after day, are universal. As Shalaby shows, school as we know it embodies one set of answers and power relations across what we are used to thinking of as an astonishingly wide range of schools, differing in student demographics, relative level of authoritarianism and so on. But other institutions, other things that "school" might mean, will have their own definitions of "troublemakers," and seeing how that plays out would, I think, be even more illuminating in comparison.

Somewhat relatedly, the section near the end, "A Letter To Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom," seems to neglect to fully confront a conflict at the heart of the book: are we willing to take children's autonomy seriously? While I agree with all the suggestions given for how to "be love." But, as she says, "classroom management... is deeply relational, human work. How we manage our authority in a classroom is rife with questions of power." I submit that if the final, bedrock requirement is that the teacher make the student learn a particular set of things, at particular times and/or in a particular order, there is no way to preserve the kind of relationship that Troublemakers is advocating for between teachers/schools and students. And this section is weaker for not acknowledging that, while some of the conflict that creates troublemakers is because of *how* we want children to perform the role of student, the hidden curriculum, some of the conflict is just in trying to force them to enact the straight up overt curriculum.]]> 4.31 Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
author: Carla Shalaby
name: Emile
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/14
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
This is a *fantastic* book. A modern, race and class conscious How Children Fail. I only nit-pick because I love...

Because it does such a good job looking at 4 examples of how children come to be constructed as trouble makers, and how that is an identity not inherent in a child but in the relationship between a child and a particular social environment, it makes me dearly wish that one more example had been included: a "troublemaker" from, say, a Sudbury Valley school or some other free/democratic school which is explicitly positioning itself as a response to the kind of hidden curriculum that Troublemakers is illuminating. Because the problems of getting lots of humans to conform themselves to each other, to get along in a big group day after day, are universal. As Shalaby shows, school as we know it embodies one set of answers and power relations across what we are used to thinking of as an astonishingly wide range of schools, differing in student demographics, relative level of authoritarianism and so on. But other institutions, other things that "school" might mean, will have their own definitions of "troublemakers," and seeing how that plays out would, I think, be even more illuminating in comparison.

Somewhat relatedly, the section near the end, "A Letter To Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom," seems to neglect to fully confront a conflict at the heart of the book: are we willing to take children's autonomy seriously? While I agree with all the suggestions given for how to "be love." But, as she says, "classroom management... is deeply relational, human work. How we manage our authority in a classroom is rife with questions of power." I submit that if the final, bedrock requirement is that the teacher make the student learn a particular set of things, at particular times and/or in a particular order, there is no way to preserve the kind of relationship that Troublemakers is advocating for between teachers/schools and students. And this section is weaker for not acknowledging that, while some of the conflict that creates troublemakers is because of *how* we want children to perform the role of student, the hidden curriculum, some of the conflict is just in trying to force them to enact the straight up overt curriculum.
]]> How Music Works 13235689
Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).

Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.]]> 345 David Byrne 1936365537 Emile 0 to-read 4.00 2014 How Music Works
author: David Byrne
name: Emile
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Thick: And Other Essays 43310729
Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom—and of course Black Twitter snark—about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.

This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.

McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.]]> 248 Tressie McMillan Cottom 1620974371 Emile 0 4.41 2019 Thick: And Other Essays
author: Tressie McMillan Cottom
name: Emile
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2020/09/22
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves:
review:
I know of McMillan Cottom from twitter, where she is unfailingly incisive. Essay collection did not disappoint. I would like to read Lower Ed now; I think I would appreciate getting to read a longer, cohesive work.
]]> Gold Fame Citrus 25437839
For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. Heading east, they are waylaid in the desert by a charming and manipulative dowser â€� a diviner for water -- and his cultlike followers, who have formed a colony in a mysterious sea of dunes.

Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.]]> 352 Claire Vaye Watkins 0698195949 Emile 0
Suffered for me from my difficulty really getting into stories with mostly unlikeable or unsympathetic protagonists.

An interesting read though; not boring.]]> 3.44 2015 Gold Fame Citrus
author: Claire Vaye Watkins
name: Emile
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/18
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
I read this for a climate fiction book club, and ultimately felt like it needed more work to really cohere? It felt like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be SF or magical realism, and each tendency kept undermining the other.

Suffered for me from my difficulty really getting into stories with mostly unlikeable or unsympathetic protagonists.

An interesting read though; not boring.
]]> <![CDATA[Silver in the Wood (The Greenhollow Duology, #1)]]> 43562824
When Greenhollow Hall acquires a handsome, intensely curious new owner in Henry Silver, everything changes. Old secrets better left buried are dug up, and Tobias is forced to reckon with his troubled past—both the green magic of the woods, and the dark things that rest in its heart.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 92 Emily Tesh 1250229782 Emile 0 4.04 2019 Silver in the Wood (The Greenhollow Duology, #1)
author: Emily Tesh
name: Emile
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2020/07/30
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
Very satisfying. Reminds me of how I felt reading early Robin McKinley. Will definitely seek out more Emily Tesh to read.
]]> <![CDATA[Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire]]> 199349339
We are living through a Long a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse , Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the Black Panthersâ€� “survival programs,â€� the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair â€� a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.]]> 272 Adam Greenfield 1788738357 Emile 0 to-read 3.85 Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
author: Adam Greenfield
name: Emile
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All's Well 59366193 All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.]]> 384 Mona Awad 1982169672 Emile 0 to-read 3.78 2021 All's Well
author: Mona Awad
name: Emile
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Land Art 1628911
Land Art is the first comprehensive overview of the many international manifestations of this type of art, and the philosophical, geographical, and cultural contexts from which it arose. The large-scale works of Robert Smithson, the often delicate and ephemeral structures arranged by Andy Goldsworthy, and the inspired creations of Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria are examined, as well as the work of equally important European artists whose crucial contributions are often overlooked.]]> 128 Ben Tufnell 1854376047 Emile 0 to-read 4.14 Land Art
author: Ben Tufnell
name: Emile
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[By Stone, by Blade, by Fire (Barbara Holloway Novels)]]> 17995307 358 Kate Wilhelm 1622050126 Emile 0
But there were a few sour notes that ultimately colored the whole book for me. The first I'm not going to call a spoiler, as it's not actually connected to any plot points or anything. Which makes it all the more baffling why it would be included. It is a throwaway anecdote that a character (older man, Herbert, present as bodyguard with his dog Morgan) uses to deflect the questions of main character's step son (Todd, late teens.) It's really icky, casual anti-native racism which I think we're supposed to read as touching light hearted bonding?


"Well, it's this way," Herbert said. "Down south, Arizona, a while back, see, I was playing poker with a bunch of Apaches and I kept winning. Didn't plan to, just lucky that night, but they began to act like they thought I was cheating or something. I wasn't cheating. I'd be scared to death I'd get caught, but that wasn't a good place to be, a big white dude with a bunch of Indians not far removed from their scalping days, and I was getting just a mite uneasy when there was a commotion in the next room and they all got up to have a look-see and I skedaddled lickety-split. A few weeks later I got to thinking that Indians don't forget, and they don't forgive, and it bothered my sleep so I had a little talk with Morgan and told him he had to warn me if they ever got on my trail. I always show him the boundaries, sort of, and if any Apaches set foot across it, I'll have time to skeddaddle again, just like before. Don't want no trouble with them, and I sure don't want my head to show up naked one morning."

Todd laughed, and in the living room Barbara smiled, then returned to the sermon she was trying to read.


The other thing like this for me was the repeated times where various characters try to talk each other into, or reassure each other that, the big villain is "crazy" or "insane" when he's really just evil.]]> 3.38 By Stone, by Blade, by Fire (Barbara Holloway Novels)
author: Kate Wilhelm
name: Emile
average rating: 3.38
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2018/12/29
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
Kate Wilhelm is an engaging writer, and this novel doesn't disappoint on that front. Things move along quickly, engaging courtroom drama, etc etc..

But there were a few sour notes that ultimately colored the whole book for me. The first I'm not going to call a spoiler, as it's not actually connected to any plot points or anything. Which makes it all the more baffling why it would be included. It is a throwaway anecdote that a character (older man, Herbert, present as bodyguard with his dog Morgan) uses to deflect the questions of main character's step son (Todd, late teens.) It's really icky, casual anti-native racism which I think we're supposed to read as touching light hearted bonding?


"Well, it's this way," Herbert said. "Down south, Arizona, a while back, see, I was playing poker with a bunch of Apaches and I kept winning. Didn't plan to, just lucky that night, but they began to act like they thought I was cheating or something. I wasn't cheating. I'd be scared to death I'd get caught, but that wasn't a good place to be, a big white dude with a bunch of Indians not far removed from their scalping days, and I was getting just a mite uneasy when there was a commotion in the next room and they all got up to have a look-see and I skedaddled lickety-split. A few weeks later I got to thinking that Indians don't forget, and they don't forgive, and it bothered my sleep so I had a little talk with Morgan and told him he had to warn me if they ever got on my trail. I always show him the boundaries, sort of, and if any Apaches set foot across it, I'll have time to skeddaddle again, just like before. Don't want no trouble with them, and I sure don't want my head to show up naked one morning."

Todd laughed, and in the living room Barbara smiled, then returned to the sermon she was trying to read.


The other thing like this for me was the repeated times where various characters try to talk each other into, or reassure each other that, the big villain is "crazy" or "insane" when he's really just evil.
]]> Summer Fishing in Lapland 145514033
When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond, or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made even more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head ever since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilisation in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Summer Fishing in Lapland is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale and nature writing.]]> 352 Juhani Karila 178227894X Emile 0 to-read 4.09 2019 Summer Fishing in Lapland
author: Juhani Karila
name: Emile
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Female Husbands: A Trans History]]> 51771013 Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.]]> 350 Jen Manion 1108483801 Emile 0 to-read 4.04 2020 Female Husbands: A Trans History
author: Jen Manion
name: Emile
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)]]> 33984975
Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy - exactly what Rosemary wants. It's also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn't part of the plan.

In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary's got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs - an experience that teaches her about love and trust and that having a family isn't necessarily the worst thing in the universe.]]> 15 Becky Chambers Emile 0 4.05 2014 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)
author: Becky Chambers
name: Emile
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2020/11/25
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:
I think this would have been my jam as a young teen. It fell flat for me now though; the worldbuilding felt like it was assuming that all the characters were embedded in what is basically our social milieu, which was extremely jarring given the species and galactic level political stuff being described. I also had a hard time with one of the characters feeling so much like a fan fiction version of Kaylee from Firefly.
]]> The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 Emile 0 to-read 4.16 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Emile
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Argonauts 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 Emile 0 to-read 4.04 2015 The Argonauts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Emile
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How To Cycle Canada The Wrong Way]]> 49116230 268 Lorraine Lambert 1702234614 Emile 0 to-read 3.33 How To Cycle Canada The Wrong Way
author: Lorraine Lambert
name: Emile
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)]]> 68235
Galileo, Courtier is a fascinating cultural and social history of science highlighting the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science.]]> 416 Mario Biagioli 0226045609 Emile 0 to-read 3.84 1993 Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)
author: Mario Biagioli
name: Emile
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology]]> 163530
" The Whale and the Reactor is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history. In its pages an analytically trained mind confronts some of the most pressing political issues of our day."—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Isis]]> 200 Langdon Winner 0226902110 Emile 0 to-read 4.09 1986 The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
author: Langdon Winner
name: Emile
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences]]> 169699 A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.

The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.]]> 392 Geoffrey C. Bowker 0262522950 Emile 0 to-read 3.96 1999 Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
author: Geoffrey C. Bowker
name: Emile
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Violin Conspiracy 58386733 A mystery about a Black classical musician whose family heirloom violin is stolen on the eve of the most prestigious classical music competition in the world.

Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise. Then with the international Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—fast approaching, his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back. But now his family and the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-grandfather are each claiming that the violin belongs to them. With the odds stacked against him and the pressure mounting, will Ray ever see his beloved violin again?]]> 345 Brendan Slocumb 0593315413 Emile 0 to-read 4.06 2022 The Violin Conspiracy
author: Brendan Slocumb
name: Emile
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Painting of Sara de Vos]]> 25664459 The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain--a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.]]> 304 Dominic Smith 0374106681 Emile 0 to-read 3.79 2016 The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
author: Dominic Smith
name: Emile
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent]]> 52514416 A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo

Women are in a bind. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don't know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?

In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let's just see? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability—a shared collaboration into the unknown.

In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault's sardonic promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."]]> 160 Katherine Angel Emile 0 to-read 4.07 2021 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
author: Katherine Angel
name: Emile
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums]]> 56269265
Humans, please turn your guns into kazoos.

Are you feeling dismay, despair, disillusion? Need a break from the ho-hum, the hopeless, and the hurtful? Feel certain that there’s a version of our world that doesn’t break down into tiny categories of alliance but brings everybody together into one clattering, sometimes discordant but always welcoming chorus of glorious pandemonium?

Amy Leach, the celebrated author of the transcendent Things That Are , invites you into The Everybody Ensemble , an effervescent tonic of a book. These short, wildly inventive essays are filled with praise songs, poetry, ingenious critique, soul-lifting philosophy, music theory, and whimsical but scientific trips into nature. Here, you will meet platypuses, Tycho Brahe and his moose, barnacle goslings, medieval mystics, photosynthetic bacteria, and a wholly fresh representation of the biblical Job.

Equal parts call to reason and to joy, this book is an irrepressible celebration of our oddball, interconnected world. The Everybody Ensemble delivers unexpected wisdom and a wake-up call that sounds from within. For readers of Ross Gay, Eula Biss, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Lewis Carroll, these twenty-four essays will be a perfect match.]]> 208 Amy Leach 0374109664 Emile 0 to-read 3.75 The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums
author: Amy Leach
name: Emile
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The View Was Exhausting: their love story has fooled the cameras but what is real behind the scenes?]]> 58240713
The world can see that international A-list actress Whitman ("Win") Tagore and jet-setting playboy Leo Milanowski are made for each other. Their kisses start Twitter trends and their fights break the internet. From red carpet appearances to Met Gala mishaps, their on-again, off-again romance has titillated the public and the press for almost a decade. But it's all a lie.

As a woman of color, Win knows the Hollywood deck is stacked against her, so she's perfected the art of controlling her public persona. Whenever she nears scandal, she calls in Leo, with his endearingly reckless attitude, for a staged date. Each public display of affection shifts the headlines back in Win's favor, and Leo uses the good press to draw attention away from his dysfunctional family.

Pretending to be in a passionate romance is one thing, but Win knows that a real relationship would lead to nothing but trouble. So instead they settle for friendship, with a side of sky-rocketing chemistry. Except this time, on the French Riviera, something is off. A shocking secret in Leo's past sets Win's personal and professional lives on a catastrophic collision course. Behind the scenes of their yacht-trips and PDA, the world's favorite couple is at each other's throats. Now they must finally confront the many truths and lies of their relationship, and Win is forced to consider what is more a rising career, or a risky shot at real love?

The View Was Exhausting is a funny, wickedly observant modern love story set against the backdrop of exotic locales and the realities of being a woman of color in a world run by men.]]> Mikaella Clements Emile 0 to-read 3.65 2021 The View Was Exhausting: their love story has fooled the cameras but what is real behind the scenes?
author: Mikaella Clements
name: Emile
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nora Goes Off Script 58988426 Nora's life is about to get a rewrite...

Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it's her job. But when her too-good-to work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage's collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it's picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive, Leo Vance, is cast as her ne'er-do-well husband Nora's life will never be the same.

The morning after shooting wraps and the crew leaves, Nora finds Leo on her porch with a half-empty bottle of tequila and a proposition. He'll pay a thousand dollars a day to stay for a week. The extra seven grand would give Nora breathing room, but it's the need in his eyes that makes her say yes. Seven days: it's the blink of an eye or an eternity depending on how you look at it. Enough time to fall in love. Enough time to break your heart.

Filled with warmth, wit, and wisdom, Nora Goes Off Script is the best kind of love story--the real kind where love is complicated by work, kids, and the emotional baggage that comes with life. For Nora and Leo, this kind of love is bigger than the big screen.]]> 272 Annabel Monaghan 0593420039 Emile 0 to-read 4.03 2022 Nora Goes Off Script
author: Annabel Monaghan
name: Emile
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)]]> 195820807
Emma hadn't planned that her next assignment as a traveling nurse would be in Minnesota, but she and her best friend agree that dating Justin is too good of an opportunity to pass up, especially when they get to rent an adorable cottage on a private island on Lake Minnetonka.

It's supposed to be a quick fling, just for the summer. But when Emma's toxic mother shows up and Justin has to assume guardianship of his three siblings, they're suddenly navigating a lot more than they expected--including catching real feelings for each other. What if this time Fate has actually brought the perfect pair together?]]> 432 Abby Jimenez 1538704439 Emile 0 to-read 4.35 2024 Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Emile
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Emile 0 to-read 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Emile
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Leftover Woman 78296909 An evocative family drama and a riveting mystery about the ferocious pull of motherhood for two very different women--from the New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee and Girl in Translation.

Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth--another female casualty of China's controversial One Child Policy. But with her husband on her trail, the clock is ticking, and she's forced to make increasingly desperate decisions if she ever hopes to be reunited with her daughter.

Meanwhile, publishing executive Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a prestigious family name and the wealth that comes with it, a high-powered career, a beautiful home, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. She's even hired a Chinese nanny to help her balance the demands of being a working wife and mother. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca's job but her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble and her role in her own family is called into question.

The Leftover Woman finds these two unforgettable women on a shocking collision course. Twisting and suspenseful and surprisingly poignant, it's a profound exploration of identity and belonging, motherhood and family. It is a story of two women in a divided city--separated by severe economic and cultural differences yet bound by a deep emotional connection to a child.]]> 288 Jean Kwok 0063031469 Emile 0 to-read 3.72 2023 The Leftover Woman
author: Jean Kwok
name: Emile
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture (Latin America Otherwise)]]> 13059536 384 Pete Sigal 082235151X Emile 0 to-read 4.17 2011 The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture (Latin America Otherwise)
author: Pete Sigal
name: Emile
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Labor's Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women]]> 187725 399 Richard O. Boyer 0916180018 Emile 0 to-read 3.79 1955 Labor's Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women
author: Richard O. Boyer
name: Emile
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Procedure Handbook of Arc Welding, 14th Edition]]> 41217476 0 9990022968 Emile 0 to-read 5.00 The Procedure Handbook of Arc Welding, 14th Edition
author: James F. Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation
name: Emile
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Infinity Particle: A Graphic Novel]]> 63930920 In this gorgeous graphic novel by Wendy Xu, co-creator of the award-winning Mooncakes, a young inventor falls for a lifelike AI and confronts questions of freedom and autonomy.

Clementine Chang moves from Earth to Mars for a new start and is lucky enough to land her dream job with Dr. Marcella Lin, an Artificial Intelligence pioneer. On her first day of work, Clem meets Dr. Lin’s assistant, a humanoid AI named Kye. Clem is no stranger to robots—she built herself a cute moth-shaped companion named SENA. Still, there’s something about Kye that feels almost too human.

When Clem and Kye begin to collaborate, their chemistry sets off sparks. The only downside? Dr. Lin is enraged by Kye’s growing independence and won’t allow him more freedom. Plus, their relationship throws into question everything Clem thought she knew about AI. After all, if Kye is sentient enough to have feelings, shouldn’t he be able to control his own actions? Where is the line between AI and human? As her past and Kye’s future weigh down on her, Clem becomes determined to help him break free—even if it means risking everything she came to Mars for.]]> 272 Wendy Xu 0062955772 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 3.96 2023 The Infinity Particle: A Graphic Novel
author: Wendy Xu
name: Emile
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Danger and Other Unknown Risks]]> 61402075 Danger and Other Unknown Risks is the highly anticipated YA graphic novel debut from Eisner Award-winning and New York Times bestselling creators Ryan North and Erica Henderson.

I'm gonna tell you a story, and I'm gonna ask that you let me finish before you say anything.

Here’s the deal—on midnight of January 1st, 2000, the world ended. But it wasn’t technology that killed it: It was magic. Now, years later, the Earth has transformed. Magic works (sort of). People are happy (sort of). But this new world isn’t stable, and unless Marguerite de Pruitt and her canine pal, Daisy, do something about it, it’ll tilt into deadly chaos. Good thing they’ve been training their whole lives for this and are destined to succeed. Or so they think.

Ryan North and Erica Henderson, the bestselling masterminds behind The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, serve up a graphic novel that is equally laugh-out-loud adventure and emotional gut punch. A story about the search for truth, chosen family, and rebirth, the journey of Marguerite and Daisy seeks to ask one vital question: How far are you willing to go to save the world?]]> 206 Ryan North 0593224841 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 3.88 2023 Danger and Other Unknown Risks
author: Ryan North
name: Emile
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> Mamo 58673892 Family matters aren’t just hocus-pocus for this young witch!

Cartoonist Sas Milledge makes her astonishing debut in her first original graphic novel that answers the question of how we all reconcile our responsibilities with our dreams for our own future. Orla O’Reilly, the youngest in a long line of hedge witches, is compelled to return home after the death of her grandmother, Mamo. In the wake of her Mamo’s passing, seas are impossible to fish, crops have soured, even Jo Manalo’s attic is taken over by a poltergeist! And to make matters worse it appears that the cause is Mamo, or her mislaid bones that is. Can Orla shoulder the responsibility of quieting her Mamo’s spirit, saving her hometown, and will she have to step up as the new witch of Haresden like Mamo always wanted? Collects Mamo #1-5.]]> 224 Sas Milledge 1684158176 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.36 2022 Mamo
author: Sas Milledge
name: Emile
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> Through the Woods 18659623 'It came from the woods. Most strange things do.'

Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss.

These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll.

Come take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there...]]> 208 Emily Carroll 1442465956 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 3.94 2014 Through the Woods
author: Emily Carroll
name: Emile
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> Fangs 54911057 A love story between a vampire and a werewolf by the creator of the enormously popular Sarah's Scribbles comics.

Elsie the vampire is three hundred years old, but in all that time, she has never met her match. This all changes one night in a bar when she meets Jimmy, a charming werewolf with a wry sense of humor and a fondness for running wild during the full moon. Together they enjoy horror films and scary novels, shady strolls, fine dining (though never with garlic), and a genuine fondness for each other’s unusual habits, macabre lifestyles, and monstrous appetites.

First featured as a webcomic series on Tapas, Fangs chronicles the humor, sweetness, and awkwardness of meeting someone perfectly suited to you but also vastly different. Filled with Sarah Andersen’s beautiful gothic illustrations and relatable relationship humor, Fangs has all the makings of a cult classic.]]> 115 Sarah Andersen Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.21 2020 Fangs
author: Sarah Andersen
name: Emile
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> Galaxy: The Prettiest Star 59235529 It takes strength to live as your true self, and one alien princess disguised as a human boy is about to test her power. A vibrant story about gender identity, romance, and shining as bright as the stars.

Taylor Barzelay has the perfect life. Good looks, good grades, a starting position on the basketball team, a loving family, even an adorable corgi. Every day in Taylor’s life is perfect. And every day is torture.

Taylor is actually the Galaxy Crowned, an alien princess from the planet Cyandii, and one of the few survivors of an intergalactic war. For six long, painful years, Taylor has accepted her duty to remain in hiding as a boy on Earth.

That all changes when Taylor meets Metropolis girl Katherine “call me Katâ€� Silverberg, whose confidence is electrifying. Suddenly, Taylor no longer wants to hide, even if exposing her true identity could attract her greatest enemies. From the charming and brilliant mind behind the popular podcast The Voice of Free Planet X, Jadzia Axelrod, and with stunningly colorful artwork by Jess Taylor comes the story of a girl in hiding who must face her fears to see herself as others see her: the prettiest star.]]> 208 Jadzia Axelrod 1401298532 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.08 2022 Galaxy: The Prettiest Star
author: Jadzia Axelrod
name: Emile
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands]]> 59069071 Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.]]> 430 Kate Beaton 1770462899 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.41 2022 Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
author: Kate Beaton
name: Emile
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> SĂ©ance Tea Party 42593850 272 Reimena Yee Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.24 2020 SĂ©ance Tea Party
author: Reimena Yee
name: Emile
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times]]> 8533688 The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.

In this book you'll learn how to:

-Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change

-Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops

-Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)

-Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed

-Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy

-Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author's original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products

-Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes

-Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash

-Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed.

The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way -- from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.]]> 324 Carol Deppe 160358031X Emile 0 to-own 4.18 2010 The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times
author: Carol Deppe
name: Emile
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2018/09/07
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-own
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking]]> 54439932
But Mona’s life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries
]]> 320 T. Kingfisher 1393519105 Emile 0 to-own 4.09 2020 A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Emile
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2021/11/13
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-own
review:
I really liked this; loved the voice of the protagonist, plot was engaging, not too dark, not too fluffy. Immediately turned around and did it as a read-aloud w/ my 14yo, they really loved it too, as did my 16yo. Reminds me a bit of Patricia C. Wrede's regency magic books. My favorite T. Kingfisher so far.
]]> <![CDATA[The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica]]> 845616 401 John Calvin Batchelor 0805037861 Emile 0 to-read, to-own 3.30 1983 The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica
author: John Calvin Batchelor
name: Emile
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, to-own
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere]]> 55761703
The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years.

Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites.

In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.
Ìę±Ő±Ő> 326 Paulette F.C. Steeves 1496202171 Emile 0 to-read, to-own 4.04 2021 The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere
author: Paulette F.C. Steeves
name: Emile
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, to-own
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses]]> 43601215 168 Robin Wall Kimmerer Emile 0 to-own 4.17 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Emile
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2020/07/25
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-own
review:
I initially liked this, but felt it was not quite as dense and amazing as Braiding Sweetgrass, but by the end was won over. Robin Wall Kimmerer is now one of the authors on my changes-the-way-I-think-about-everything shelf.
]]> Such a Fun Age 50210178
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living showing other women how to do the same. A mother to two small girls, she started out as a blogger and has quickly built herself into a confidence-driven brand. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains� toddler one night. Seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, a security guard at their local high-end supermarket accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make it right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family,â€� the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.]]> Kiley Reid Emile 5 to-own
And in addition to all that, some of the best toddler dialog from Briar ever, making me miss my kids' toddler years *so much*!]]> 3.75 2019 Such a Fun Age
author: Kiley Reid
name: Emile
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/07
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-own
review:
This is one of my favorite fiction reads in awhile. An amazing, sharp, subtle, skewering portrayal of Alix; incredibly compelling protagonist in Emira; just fantastic all around.

And in addition to all that, some of the best toddler dialog from Briar ever, making me miss my kids' toddler years *so much*!
]]> <![CDATA[Roundwood Timber Framing: Building Naturally Using Local Resources]]> 9950637 172 Ben Law 1856230414 Emile 0 to-read, to-own 4.09 2010 Roundwood Timber Framing: Building Naturally Using Local Resources
author: Ben Law
name: Emile
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, to-own
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Encyclopedia Lumberjanica: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Lumberjanes]]> 55748428 99 Susan Coiner-Collier 1646680111 Emile 0 to-read 3.86 Encyclopedia Lumberjanica: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Lumberjanes
author: Susan Coiner-Collier
name: Emile
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Thirsty Mermaids 54304166 break the spell, and are now stuck on land for the foreseeable future. Which means everything from: enlisting the aid of their I-know-we-just-met-but-can-we-crash-with-you bartender friend, struggling to make sense of the human world around them, to even trying to get jobs with zero skill sets . . . all while attempting to somehow return to the sea and making the most of their current situation with tenacity and camaraderie (especially if someone else is buying).]]> 256 Kat Leyh 1982133570 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.11 2021 Thirsty Mermaids
author: Kat Leyh
name: Emile
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> Bird Witch 23994575 153 Kat Leyh Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.25 2014 Bird Witch
author: Kat Leyh
name: Emile
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace]]> 11300085
Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them.

She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.]]> 272 Tamar Adler 143918187X Emile 0 to-read 4.18 2011 An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
author: Tamar Adler
name: Emile
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rental Person Who Does Nothing]]> 128183600 Need a rental person who does nothing?

Shoji Morimoto provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. After an old boss told him that he contributed nothing and that it made no difference whether he showed up to work or not, he wondered if a person who ‘does nothingâ€� could still have a place in the world. With a tweet, his Rental Person service was born.
- Have a deep secret you desperately need to reveal, so deep that you can’t tell a friend or family member?
- Have you spent a long time home alone, and want to know what it’s like to have somebody with you at your apartment?
- Or for someone to simply think of you on a stressful day? Or wave to you as you leave the train station on a long journey?

Morimoto is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger throughout each request, and his encounters are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology.

In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs, and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life.]]> 160 Shoji Morimoto 1035012839 Emile 0 to-read 3.32 2023 Rental Person Who Does Nothing
author: Shoji Morimoto
name: Emile
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job]]> 52692515 Convenience Store Woman meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing � and ideally, very little thinking.

She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly � how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?

As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...]]> 416 Kikuko Tsumura 1526622246 Emile 0 to-read 3.61 2015 There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
author: Kikuko Tsumura
name: Emile
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Malice 149424072 1 Raven Leilani Emile 0 to-read 0.0 Malice
author: Raven Leilani
name: Emile
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Emile 0 to-read 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Emile
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hillbilly Queer: A Memoir 56310118 �. . . One of the most humane and challenging memoirs to come out of the Midwest . . . Indeed, we are all more than heroes and villains, and Jamison does a great job of showing how and where our humanity gets lost between the two.�

-- Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody’s Daughter and
host of the HBO podcast Lovecraft Country Radio

J.R. Jamison spends his days in a world of trigger warnings and safe spaces, while his trigger-happy dad, Dave, spends his questioning why Americans have become so sensitive. Yet at the height of the 2016 election, the two decide to put political differences aside and travel to rural Missouri for Dave’s fifty-five year class reunion. But with the constant backdrop of the Trump vs. Clinton battle at every turn, they are forced to explore one formidable question: Will the trip push them further apart or bring them closer together?

Traveling through the rural, sun-beaten landscapes of Missouri the two meet people along the way who challenge their concepts of right and wrong, and together they uncover truths about their family’s past that reveals more than political differences, they discover a lesson on the human condition that lands them on the international pages of The Guardian.

Hillbilly Queer is an enduring love story between a dad and son who find that sometimes the differences between us aren't really that different at all.

“One of those rare books that finds beauty in the irreconcilable. In an age when our politics and our nation can feel broken, Hillbilly Queer shows us the messy glue of love that still holds families together.â€�

-- Samantha Allen, author of Real Queer America]]> 242 J.R. Jamison 1734558164 Emile 0 to-read 3.93 2020 Hillbilly Queer: A Memoir
author: J.R. Jamison
name: Emile
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> Some Desperate Glory 58388343 While we live, the enemy shall fear us.

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.

A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.]]> 438 Emily Tesh 1250834988 Emile 0 to-read 4.01 2023 Some Desperate Glory
author: Emily Tesh
name: Emile
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Come and Get It 96562153
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 1526632543 Emile 0 to-read 3.49 2024 Come and Get It
author: Kiley Reid
name: Emile
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/04
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]]> The Bug: A Novel 19573124
In 1984, at the dawn of the personal-computer era, Roberta Walton, a novice software tester at a SiliconValley start-up, stumbles across a bug. She brings it to its inadvertent creator, Ethan Levin, a longtime programmer who is working at the limits of his knowledge and abilities. Both believe this is a bug like any other to be found and fixed and crossed off the list. But no matter how obsessively Ethan combs through the depths of the code, he can't find its cause. Roberta runs test after test but can't make the bug appear at will. Meanwhile, the bug, living up to its name, "The Jester," shows itself only at the least opportune times and jeopardizes the fate of the company.

Under the pressures of his obsession with the bug and his rapidly deteriorating personal life, Ethan begins to unravel. Roberta, on the other hand, is drawn to the challenge. Forced to learn how to program, she comes to appreciate the intense intimacy of speaking the computer's language.

As she did in Close to the Machine , Ellen Ullman brilliantly limns the space between human beings and computers–a space we all occupy every day as we peer into our monitors. Ullman has been a computer programmer for more than twenty years, and having switched from code to prose, she has shown herself to be a unique, revelatory writer. She is the insider who can articulate the realities of the technical world, taking readers to emotional and intellectual places fiction has never brought them before. With The Bug , Ullman proves she is not only a remarkable essayist but also a master storyteller.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 372 Ellen Ullman Emile 0 to-read 3.96 2004 The Bug: A Novel
author: Ellen Ullman
name: Emile
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes]]> 42482167
In this dazzling memoir, the acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and Marvel’s Thor reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder and a terrible secret.

Joe's early life nearly defies belief. Raised by damaged adults—a con-man grandfather and a manipulative grandmother, a violent, drunken father and a mother who was repeatedly institutionalized—Joe grew up in abject poverty, living in slums and projects when not on the road, crisscrossing the country in his father’s desperate attempts to escape the consequences of his past.

To survive his abusive environment Joe found refuge in his beloved comics and his dreams, immersing himself in imaginary worlds populated by superheroes whose amazing powers allowed them to overcome any adversity. The deeper he read, the more he came to realize that he, too, had a superpower: the ability to tell stories and make everything come out the way he wanted it. But even as he found success, he could not escape a dark and shocking secret that hung over his family’s past, a violent truth that he uncovered over the course of decades involving mass murder.

Straczynski’s personal history has always been shrouded in mystery. Becoming Superman lays bare the facts of his life: a story of creation and darkness, hope and success, a larger-than-life villain and a little boy who became the hero of his own life. It is also a compelling behind-the-scenes look at some of the most successful TV series and movies recognized around the world.

Featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman.]]> 460 J. Michael Straczynski 0062857843 Emile 0 to-read 4.63 2019 Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes
author: J. Michael Straczynski
name: Emile
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/02
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]]> High School 58749443 372 Tegan Quin Emile 0 currently-reading 4.29 2019 High School
author: Tegan Quin
name: Emile
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Travel Light 827276 The Sword in the Stone.]]> 135 Naomi Mitchison 1931520143 Emile 0 to-read 3.88 1952 Travel Light
author: Naomi Mitchison
name: Emile
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/26
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]]> Bea Wolf 60316971 A modern middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, featuring a gang of troublemaking kids who must defend their tree house from a fun-hating adult who can instantly turn children into grown-ups.

Listen! Hear a tale of mallow-munchers and warriors who answer candy’s clarion call!

Somewhere in a generic suburb stands Treeheart, a kid-forged sanctuary where generations of tireless tykes have spent their youths making merry, spilling soda, and staving off the shadow of adulthood. One day, these brave warriors find their fun cut short by their nefarious neighbor Grindle, who can no longer tolerate the sounds of mirth seeping into his joyless adult life.

As the guardian of gloom lays siege to Treeheart, scores of kids suddenly find themselves transformed into pimply teenagers and sullen adults! The survivors of the onslaught cry out for a savior—a warrior whose will is unbreakable and whose appetite for mischief is unbounded.

They call for Bea Wolf.]]> 208 Zach Weinersmith 1250776295 Emile 0 to-read, maybe-2023 4.36 2023 Bea Wolf
author: Zach Weinersmith
name: Emile
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/26
shelves: to-read, maybe-2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture]]> 61383950 For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast: A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality—and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity.

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex—and that we all have to have it—is false. It's intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that's not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity.

In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. Brown advocates for the "A" in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer—despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.

With chapters on desire, f*ckability, utility, refusal, and possibilities, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality discusses topics of deep relevance to ace and a-spec communities. It centers the Black asexual experience—and demands visibility in a world that pathologizes and denies asexuality, denigrates queerness, and specifically sexualizes Black people.

A necessary and unapologetic reclamation, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is smart, timely, and an essential read for asexuals, aromantics, queer readers, and anyone looking to better understand sexual politics in America.]]> 226 Sherronda J. Brown 1623177111 Emile 0 to-read 4.35 2022 Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture
author: Sherronda J. Brown
name: Emile
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War]]> 61089467 352 Jeff Sharlet 1324006498 Emile 0 to-read 3.98 2023 The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
author: Jeff Sharlet
name: Emile
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice]]> 61399139
The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse. 
 Â�
The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair , she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities. 
 Â�
Deeply researched and compassionately told, Truth and Repair envisions a new path to justice for all.Ìę±Ő±Ő> 272 Judith Lewis Herman 1541600541 Emile 0 to-read 4.20 Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice
author: Judith Lewis Herman
name: Emile
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism]]> 33976850 A longtime insider explores the origins of modern protest movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, offering a groundbreaking history of disruptive protest and American radicalism since the Sixties   As Americans take to the streets in record numbers, L.A. Kauffman’s timely, trenchant history of protest offers unique insights into how past movements have won victories in times of crisis and backlash and how they can be most effective today.   This deeply researched account, twenty-five years in the making, traces the evolution of disruptive protest since the Sixties to tell a larger story about the reshaping of the American left. Kauffman, a longtime grassroots organizer, examines how movements from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used disruptive tactics to catalyze change despite long odds.   Kauffman’s lively and elegant history is propelled by hundreds of candid interviews conducted over a span of decades. Direct Action showcases the voices of key players in an array of movements—environmentalist, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-globalization, racial-justice, anti-war, and more—across an era when American politics shifted to the right, and a constellation of decentralized issue- and identity-based movements supplanted the older ideal of a single, unified left.   Now, as protest movements again take on a central and urgent political role, Kauffman’s history offers both striking lessons for the current moment and an unparalleled overview of the landscape of recent activism. Written with nuance and humor, Direct Action is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the protest movements of our time.“The best overview of how protest works—when it does—and what it’s achieved over the past 50 years.â€� —Rebecca Solnit, The New York Times]]> 255 L.A. Kauffman 1784784109 Emile 0 to-read 4.00 Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism
author: L.A. Kauffman
name: Emile
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/06
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]]> The Pushcart War 219557
It’s a story of how regular people banded together and, armed with little more than their brains and good aim, defeated a mighty foe.

Not long ago the streets of New York City were smelly, smoggy, sooty, and loud. There were so many trucks making deliveries that it might take an hour for a car to travel a few blocks. People blamed the truck owners and the truck owners blamed the little wooden pushcarts that traveled the city selling everything from flowers to hot dogs. Behind closed doors the truck owners declared war on the pushcart peddlers. Carts were smashed from Chinatown to Chelsea. The peddlers didn’t have money or the mayor on their side, but that didn’t stop them from fighting back. They used pea shooters to blow tacks into the tires of trucks, they outwitted the police, and they marched right up to the grilles of those giant trucks and dared them to drive down their streets. Today, thanks to the ingenuity of the pushcart peddlers, the streets belong to the people—and to the pushcarts.

The Pushcart War was first published more than fifty years ago. It has inspired generations of children and been adapted for television, radio, and the stage around the world. It was included on School Library Journal’s list of One Hundred Books That Shaped the Twentieth Century, and its assertion that a committed group of men and women can prevail against a powerful force is as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in 1964.]]> 224 Jean Merrill 0440471478 Emile 0 to-read 4.18 1964 The Pushcart War
author: Jean Merrill
name: Emile
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/06
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]]> The Owl Service 83829 219 Alan Garner 0152056181 Emile 0 to-read 3.70 1967 The Owl Service
author: Alan Garner
name: Emile
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> Anarchy in Action 667765 144 Colin Ward 0900384204 Emile 0 to-read 3.95 1973 Anarchy in Action
author: Colin Ward
name: Emile
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail]]> 108400 Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:
-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America
-- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO
-- The Southern Civil Rights Movement
-- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.]]> 416 Frances Fox Piven 0394726979 Emile 0 to-read 4.11 1977 Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail
author: Frances Fox Piven
name: Emile
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism]]> 2598616 234 Aileen Moreton-Robinson 0702231347 Emile 0 to-read 4.48 2000 Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism
author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
name: Emile
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Indigenous Americas)]]> 23508230 How whiteness operationalizes race to colonize and displace Indigenous sovereignty

The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession.

Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies are central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, sidestepping issues of settler colonialism.

Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of the prerogatives of white possession within the role of disciplines.]]> 239 Aileen Moreton-Robinson 0816692165 Emile 0 to-read 4.30 2015 The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Indigenous Americas)
author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
name: Emile
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/21
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]]> Fly by Night 710437
Enter Eponymous Clent, a smooth-talking con man who seems to love words nearly as much as Mosca herself. Soon Mosca and Clent are living a life of deceit and danger -- discovering secret societies, following shady characters onto floating coffeehouses, and entangling themselves with crazed dukes and double-crossing racketeers. It would be exactly the kind of tale Mosca has always longed to take part in, until she learns that her one true love -- words -- may be the death of her.

"Fly by Night" is astonishingly original, a grand feat of the imagination from a masterful new storyteller.]]> 486 Frances Hardinge 0060876271 Emile 0 to-read 3.79 2005 Fly by Night
author: Frances Hardinge
name: Emile
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/16
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]]> <![CDATA[American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit]]> 52920119
One such trickster is Brer Rabbit, who was introduced to North America through the folktales of enslaved Africans. On the plantations, Brer Rabbit, like Anansi in the Caribbean, functioned as a resistance figure for the enslaved whose trickery was aimed at undermining and challenging the plantation regime. Yet as Brer Rabbit tales moved from the oral tradition to the printed page in the late nineteenth-century, the trickster was emptied of his potentially powerful symbolism by white American collectors, authors and folklorists in their attempt to create a nostalgic fantasy of the plantation past.

American Trickster offers readers a unique insight into the cultural significance of the Brer Rabbit trickster figure, from his African roots and through to his influence on contemporary culture. Exploring the changing portrayals of the trickster figure through a wealth of cultural forms including folktales, advertising, fiction and films the book scrutinises the profound tensions between the perpetuation of damaging racial stereotypes and the need to keep African-American folk traditions alive. Emily Zobel Marshall argues that Brer Rabbit was eventually reclaimed by twentieth-century African-American novelists whose protagonists ‘trickâ€� their way out of limiting stereotypes, break down social and cultural boundaries and offer readers practical and psychological methods for challenging the traumatic legacies of slavery and racism]]> 182 Emily Zobel Marshall 1783481099 Emile 0 to-read 4.50 American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit
author: Emily Zobel Marshall
name: Emile
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions]]> 60268621 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask

The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer door at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist.

Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this practical guide for impractical ideas. Unfazed by absurdity, Munroe consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airliner catapult-design to answer his readers' questions, clearly and concisely, with illuminating and occasionally terrifying illustrations. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances.]]> 366 Randall Munroe 0525537120 Emile 0 currently-reading 4.47 2022 What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
author: Randall Munroe
name: Emile
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
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]]> The Night Sessions 2945119 324 Ken MacLeod 1841496510 Emile 0 currently-reading 3.58 2008 The Night Sessions
author: Ken MacLeod
name: Emile
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Luster 51541496
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.]]> 227 Raven Leilani 0374194327 Emile 0 currently-reading 3.51 2020 Luster
author: Raven Leilani
name: Emile
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
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]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

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

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

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

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Emile 0 currently-reading 4.17 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Emile
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
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]]> The Goldfinch 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 Emile 0 currently-reading 3.94 2013 The Goldfinch
author: Donna Tartt
name: Emile
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
shelves: currently-reading
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]]>