en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 11:59:41 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 220687890 A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK � The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.]]> 336 Tommy Orange 0593311442 Eric 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Tommy Orange
name: Eric
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 77585 Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson took science fiction to dazzling new levels. Now, in The Diamond Age, he delivers another stunning tale. Set in twenty-first-century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life --- and the entire future of humanity --- is about to be decoded and reprogrammed....]]> 499 Neal Stephenson 0553573314 Eric 4 Wow� what an ending. 4.13 1995
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Eric
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: at-apl, fantasy, read-in-2025, science-fiction
review:
Wow� what an ending.
]]> 207294076 From Yale professor and bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a searing confrontation with the authoritarian right’s efforts to annihilate public education, silence teachers, and use taxpayer money to undo a century of work to advance social justice action on race, gender, sexuality, and class.Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have all reached the same if you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history. He shows that hearts and minds are won in our elementary schools, high schools, and universities—and that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students. Deeply informed and urgently needed, this book is a vibrant call to action for lovers of democracy worldwide.]]> 256 Jason F. Stanley 1668056917 Eric 0 to-read 4.30 2024
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: Eric
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218372426 From the author of the New York Times bestsellers Humankind and Utopia for Realists—“a more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell� (The New York Times)—comes a bold manifesto daring us to harness our talents and transform our idealism into action, all with the goal of making the world a wildly better place.

A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems� whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.

In Moral Ambition, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They’re the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled. A guidebook to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and shows how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.]]> 304 Rutger Bregman 031658035X Eric 0 to-read 3.91 2024
author: Rutger Bregman
name: Eric
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 44403028
Marx was a social critic for whom capitalism was not the end of human history. It was just the latest phase and badly needed the transition to something better. We offer this essay now because of the power and usefulness today of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system.]]> 100 Richard D. Wolff 0359467024 Eric 0 to-read 4.06 2019
author: Richard D. Wolff
name: Eric
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 400900
But in assembling a new fighting force from the dregs and rabble of Taglios, she finds herself offered help by a mysterious, ancient cult of murder--competent, reliable, and apparently committed to her goals.

Meanwhile, far away, Shadowmasters conspire against one another and the world, weaving dark spells that reach into the heart of Taglios. And in a hidden grove, a familiar figure slowly awakens to find himself the captive of an animated, headless corpse.

Mercilessly cutting through Taglian intrigues, Lady appears to be growing stronger every day. All that disturbs her are the dreams which afflict her by night--dreams of carnage, of destruction, of universal death, unceasing...
]]> 346 Glen Cook 0812502108 Eric 3 fantasy, read-in-2025 4.11 1990
author: Glen Cook
name: Eric
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 86508927
But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department—a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith—when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note—a potentially suicidal gesture—she comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.]]> 400 Sandra Newman 0063265338 Eric 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Sandra Newman
name: Eric
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220160351 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

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

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

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 368 Kaliane Bradley 166804515X Eric 0 to-read 3.63 2024
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Eric
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 113540
Every step of the way the Company is hounded by shadowy figured and carrion-eating crows. As they march every southward, through bug infested jungle, rivers dense with bloodthirsty pirates, and cities, dead and living, haunted by the passage of the Company north, their numbers grow until they are thousands strong.

But always they are watched--by the Shadowmasters--a deadly new enemy: twisted creature that deal in darkness and death: powerful, shadowy creatures bent on smothering the world in their foul embrace. This is the first round in a deadly game, a game that the Black Company cannot hope to win.
]]> 311 Glen Cook 0812533828 Eric 3 read-in-2025 4.10 1989
author: Glen Cook
name: Eric
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: read-in-2025
review:

]]> 60311454 Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

A patient escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the world's population within a few weeks. Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge--Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious "Dark Man," who delights in chaos and violence. As the dark man and the peaceful woman gather power, the survivors will have to choose between them--and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.

(This edition includes all of the new and restored material first published in The Stand The Complete And Uncut Edition.)]]> 1439 Stephen King 0307743683 Eric 3 read-in-2024 4.24 1978
author: Stephen King
name: Eric
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: read-in-2024
review:
3.5 stars. Well this took me 4 months to listen to the uncut version. It was quite a trip. Definitely worth experiencing once.
]]> 53968432 A poignant and witty graphic novel by a leading New Yorker cartoonist, following a millennial's journey from performing his life to truly connecting with people

Nick, a young illustrator, can’t shake the feeling that there is some hidden realm of human interaction beyond his reach. He haunts lookalike fussy, silly, coffee shops, listens to old Joni Mitchell albums too loudly, and stares at his navel in the hope that he will find it in there. But it isn’t until he learns to speak from the heart that he begins to find authentic human connections and is let in—to the worlds of the people he meets. Nick’s journey occurs alongside the beginnings of a relationship with Wren, a wry, spirited oncologist at a nearby hospital, whose work and life becomes painfully tangled with Nick’s.

Illustrated in both color and black-and-white in McPhail’s instantly recognizable style, In elevates the graphic novel genre; it captures his trademark humor and compassion with a semi-autobiographical tale that is equal parts hilarious and heart-wrenching—uncannily appropriate for our isolated times.]]> 267 Will McPhail 0358345545 Eric 0 to-read 4.37 2021
author: Will McPhail
name: Eric
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Eric 0 to-read 4.30 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Eric
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 228837191
In a deep medieval future, a band of players travels across France to perform the same old tales in the same old towns. When passing soldiers entrust them with a mysterious box that they say must be delivered to the Imperator, old playwright Master Guillaume and young escaped thief Rufus puzzle at what the box might contain.

When Rufus overhears strange conversations between his Master Guillaume and the thing in the box, he must choose between his loyalty to the man who saved him from the noose and fear of the ancient intelligence working in their midst.

Secrets spill out over the road to Avignon, and none in the troupe are safe. Not Blind Benedict, who once saw the faceless Empty Knight patrolling the deathless Wald that creeps ever closer to the cities, and not Master Bernard whose sensible plans are not equal to the eldritch thing the company now carries with them. All the world’s a stage, and so was every world that came before.]]> 120 Alastair Reynolds 1645242803 Eric 0 to-read 4.10
author: Alastair Reynolds
name: Eric
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217005288
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano 0593243757 Eric 0 to-read 4.13 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Eric
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40396179
Published the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring , Poul Anderson’s novel The Broken Sword draws on similar Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon sources. In his greed for land and power, Orm the Strong slays the family of a Saxon witch—and for his sins, the Northman must pay with his newborn son. Stolen by elves and replaced by a changeling, Skafloc is raised to manhood unaware of his true heritage and treasured for his ability to handle the iron that the elven dare not touch. Meanwhile, the being who supplanted him as Orm’s son grows up angry and embittered by the humanity he has been denied. A pawn in a witch’s vengeance, the creature Valgard will never know love, and consumed by rage, he will commit a murderous act of unspeakable vileness.
Ěý
It is their destiny to finally meet on the field of battle—the man-elf and his dark twin, the monster—when the long-simmering war between elves and trolls finally erupts with a devastating fury. And only the mighty sword Tyrfing, broken by Thor and presented to Skafloc in infancy, can turn the tide in a terrible clashing of faerie folk that will ultimately determine the fate of the old gods.
Ěý
Along with such notables as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Poul Anderson is considered one of the masters of speculative fiction.

This edition contains the author’s original text.]]> 271 Poul Anderson 1504054954 Eric 4 fantasy, read-in-2025 3.98 1954
author: Poul Anderson
name: Eric
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2025
review:
4.5. Pretty metal. The titular sword reminds me of a certain sword in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I really liked this book. It took me several years to start it after I bought it and I’m glad I did. It packs so much into a fairly short length. It was brutal, full of innuendo, and very engrossing. Highly recommended.
]]> 201750794
They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Tables, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords are laying siege to Camelot, and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.]]> 673 Lev Grossman 0735224048 Eric 3 fantasy, read-in-2025 3.94 2024
author: Lev Grossman
name: Eric
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 29396 In this extraordinary fantasy epic, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files leads readers into a world where the fate of the realm rests on the shoulders of a boy with no power to call his own ...

For a thousand years, the people of Alera have united against the aggressive and threatening races that inhabit the world, using their unique bonds with the furies - elementals of earth, air, fire, water, wood, and metal. But in the remote Calderon Valley, the boy Tavi struggles with his lack of furycrafting. At fifteen, he has no wind fury to help him fly, no fire fury to light the lamps. Yet as the Alerans' most savage enemy - the Marat horde - returns to the Valley, Tavi's courage and resourcefulness will be a power greater than any fury, one that could turn the tides of war ...

]]> 688 Jim Butcher 044101268X Eric 3 4.12 2004
author: Jim Butcher
name: Eric
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read-in-2025, fantasy, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 400914 ]]> 313 Glen Cook 0812502205 Eric 3 fantasy, read-in-2025 3.96 1989
author: Glen Cook
name: Eric
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 37534877 The father of Grimdark returns�

The soldiers of the Black Company don’t ask questions, they get paid. But being “The Lady’s favored� is attracting the wrong kind of attention and has put a target on their backs, and the Company’s historian, Croaker, has the biggest target of all.

The one person who was taken into The Lady’s Tower and returned unchanged has earned the special interest of the court of sorcerers known as The Ten Who Were Taken. Now, he and the company are being asked to seek the aid of their newest member, Mischievous Rain, to break a rebel army. However, Croaker doesn’t trust any ofthe Taken, especially not ones that look so much like The Lady and her sister�

The Chronicles of the Black Company
#1 The Chronicles of The Black Company / #2 The Books of the South / #3 The Return of The Black Company / #4 The Many Deaths of the Black Company]]> 397 Glen Cook 1250174570 Eric 0 to-read 3.80 2018
author: Glen Cook
name: Eric
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61279009
Few written works can so confidently claim to have shaped the course of history as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since first rattling the gates of the ruling order in 1848, this incendiary pamphlet has never ceased providing fuel for the fire in the hearts of those who dream of a better world. Nor has it stopped haunting the nightmares of those who sit atop the vastly unequal social system it condemns.

In this strikingly imaginative introduction, China Miéville provides readers with a guide to understanding the Manifesto and the many specters it has conjured. Through his unique and unorthodox reading, Miéville offers a spirited defense of the enduring relevance of Marx and Engels� ideas.

Presented along with the full text of the Communist Manifesto, Miéville's guide has something to offer first-time readers, revolutionary partisans, and even the most hard-nosed skeptics.]]> 300 China Miéville 1642598917 Eric 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: China Miéville
name: Eric
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13132235

Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed this -- and other forms of religious activity in public schools -- legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in America's public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.]]> 290 Katherine Stewart 1586488430 Eric 0 to-read 4.25 2012
author: Katherine Stewart
name: Eric
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 44453035 For readers of Democracy in Chains and Dark Money, a revelatory investigation of the Religious Right's rise to political power.

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. But in her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: America's Religious Right has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement. It seeks to gain political power and impose its vision on society. It isn't fighting a culture war; it is waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart shows that the real power of the movement lies in a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations, embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances with like-minded, anti-democratic religious nationalists around the world, including Russia. She follows the money behind the movement and traces much of it to a group of super-wealthy, ultra-conservative donors and family foundations. The Christian nationalist movement is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.

The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart's probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and American democratic freedoms.]]> 352 Katherine Stewart 1635573432 Eric 0 to-read 4.25 2020
author: Katherine Stewart
name: Eric
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211003831 In an explosive follow-up to The Power Worshippers, Katherine Stewart traces the disparate yet united “engine of unreason� roiling American culture and politics.

Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, back-room strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down. She introduces us to reactionary Catholic activists, atheist billionaires, pseudo-Platonist intellectuals, self-appointed apostles of Jesus, disciples of Ayn Rand, women-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,� pro-natalists preoccupied with the dearth of white babies, Covid truthers, militia members masquerading as "concerned moms," and battalions of spirit warriors who appear to be inventing a new religion even as they set about attacking democracy and its foundations.

Along the way, she provides a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States. She demonstrates that the movement relies on three very different groups-the funders, the thinkers, and the foot-soldiers-each with different beliefs and often conflicting aims. Stewart's reporting and comprehensive political analysis helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points the way forward toward a democratic future.
]]> 352 Katherine Stewart 163557854X Eric 0 to-read 4.21
author: Katherine Stewart
name: Eric
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52676540 For the past six months, newly chosen Green Lantern Sojourner "Jo" Mullein has been protecting the City Enduring, a massive metropolis of 20 billion people. The city has maintained peace for over 500 years by stripping its citizens of their ability to feel. As a result, violent crime is virtually unheard of, and murder is nonexistent.
But that's all about to change in this new maxiseries that gives a DC Young Animal spin to the legacy of the Green Lanterns!]]> 312 N.K. Jemisin Eric 0 to-read 4.12 2019
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Eric
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217869789 From the New York Times bestselling author and television and podcast host, a powerful, wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.

We all feel it � the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, �With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. The Sirens� Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 336 Christopher L. Hayes 0593653114 Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 4.07 2025
author: Christopher L. Hayes
name: Eric
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 214175076 A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government—“the best book to date on the biggest political issue that nobody is talking about� (Matthew Yglesias)

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of “The Establishment.� A half-century ago, progressivism’s designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government. Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good. The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement’s ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism.

A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated—and progressivism pointed the way out. The same can happen again. Marc J. Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today’s paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government. To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong. Progressivism’s success moving forward hinges on the movement’s willingness to rediscover its roots.]]> 416 Marc J. Dunkelman 154170021X Eric 0 to-read 4.02
author: Marc J. Dunkelman
name: Eric
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217313011
In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.

Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

By an “endlessly inventive� (Vulture) author with a “wicked sense of humor� (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.]]> 432 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820710 Eric 0 to-read 4.42 2024
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Eric
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58783229
Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation's Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar white Christian nationalism.

In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it's headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries―and especially its influence over the last three decades―they show how, throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property."

White Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment. The future of American democracy, Gorski and Perry argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans―stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals―can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.]]> 176 Philip S. Gorski 0197618685 Eric 0 to-read 4.13 2022
author: Philip S. Gorski
name: Eric
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220458656 An illuminating exploration of how to maintain a happy sex life in a long-term relationship, from the New York Times bestselling author of Come as You Are and co-author of Burnout.

In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, PhD, provided science-backed lessons that revolutionized the way we think about women's sexuality. Now, in Come Together, Nagoski takes on a fundamentally misunderstood subject: good sex.

Nagoski breaks down the myths many of us have been taught about sex--for instance, the belief that sexual satisfaction and desire are highest at the beginning of a relationship and that they will inevitably decline the longer that relationship lasts. Nagoski assures us that's not true.

So, what is true? Come Together isn't about how much we want sex, or how often we're having it; it's about whether we like the sex we're having. Nagoski breaks down the obstacles that impede us from enjoying sex--from stress and body image, to relationship difficulties and gendered beliefs about how sex "should" be--and presents the best ways to overcome them. You'll learn:


That "spontaneous desire" is not the kind of desire to strive for if you want to have great sex for decades.
Vocabulary for talking with partners about ways to get in "the mood" and how to not take it personally when "the mood" is nowhere to be found.
How to understand your own and your partners' emotional floorplan, so that you have a blueprint for how to get to a sexy state of mind.

With her signature insight, humor, and empathy, Nagoski shows us what great sex can look like, how to create it in our own lives, and what to do when struggles arise.]]> 368 Emily Nagoski 0593500830 Eric 0 to-read 3.85 2024
author: Emily Nagoski
name: Eric
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1696246 608 Peter Salway 0192801384 Eric 0 to-read 3.90 1981
author: Peter Salway
name: Eric
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Eric 0 3.53 1851
author: Herman Melville
name: Eric
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read, classics, to-read-in-2019, to-read-in-2020, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Eric
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 41720335 An immersive journey through the culture and cuisine of one Japanese town, its forest, and its watershed--where ducks are hunted by net, saké is brewed from the purest mountain water, and charcoal is fired in stone kilns--by an American writer and food stylist who spent years working alongside artisans.

One night, Brooklyn-based artist and food writer Hannah Kirshner received a life-changing invitation to apprentice with a "saké evangelist" in a misty Japanese mountain village called Yamanaka. In a rapidly modernizing Japan, the region--a stronghold of the country's old-fashioned ways--was quickly becoming a destination for chefs and artisans looking to learn about the traditions that have long shaped Japanese culture. Kirshner put on a vest and tie and took her place behind the saké bar. Before long, she met a community of craftspeople, farmers, and foragers--master woodturners, hunters, a paper artist, and a man making charcoal in his nearly abandoned village on the outskirts of town. Kirshner found each craftsperson not only exhibited an extraordinary dedication to their work but their distinct expertise contributed to the fabric of the local culture. Inspired by these masters, she devoted herself to learning how they work and live.

Taking readers deep into evergreen forests, terraced rice fields, and smoke-filled workshops, Kirshner captures the centuries-old traditions still alive in Yamanaka. Water, Wood, and Wild Things invites readers to see what goes into making a fine bowl, a cup of tea, or a harvest of rice and introduces the masters who dedicate their lives to this work. Part travelogue, part meditation on the meaning of work, and full of her own beautiful drawings and recipes, Kirshner's refreshing book is an ode to a place and its people, as well as a profound examination of what it means to sustain traditions and find purpose in cultivation and craft.]]> 368 Hannah Kirshner 1984877526 Eric 0 to-read 4.31 2021
author: Hannah Kirshner
name: Eric
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35604686 --John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down
An instant New York Times bestseller, this stunning, heartbreaking novel about grief, love, and family is perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Celeste Ng.

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between reality and magic, past and present, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a luminous debut novel about finding oneself through family history, art, bravery, and love.]]> 462 Emily X.R. Pan Eric 0 to-read 4.05 2018
author: Emily X.R. Pan
name: Eric
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790861 To fix the world they first must break it further.

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.]]> 376 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1250290287 Eric 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Eric
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201204541 288 David Vaux 1780726090 Eric 0 to-read 3.78
author: David Vaux
name: Eric
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211642069 For fans ofĚýThe GoldfinchĚýandĚýTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, an ambitious and absorbing debut that follows three generations of women from New York to rural Ireland and back again.

New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. When a letter arrives from an aunt she didn’t know existed in Ireland with the offer of a new life, the name jogs a an old videocassette game Cora used to play as a child where two sisters must save the students of a mysterious boarding school.

County Donegal, 1974. An eclectic group of artists known as the Screamers arrives in Burtonport and moves into the old schoolhouse down the road from where Roisin lives with her older sister Moira. Alternately kind and cruel, brilliant artist Moira is a mystery to Roisin, as is Moira’s relationship with the boy next door, Michael. When the Screamers look to hire an artist in residence, Roisin enlists Michael’s help to get Moira the job, setting in motion a chain of events that will put an ocean between the sisters and threaten to tear them apart forever.

Burtonport, 2018. Lyca Brady lives in a sprawling old house with her mother, Cora, and great aunt, Ro. Abortion has just been legalized in Ireland, and Lyca is struggling to find herself outside her mother’s activism. An unexpected message from a childhood friend sends Lyca searching her house’s mysterious attic, with its strange collection of old medical equipment, piles of paperwork, and dusty boxes of ancient video games. There, she unearths secrets hidden for decades—secrets perhaps better left unknown.

Catherine Airey’s haunting debut spins a mesmerizing story of family and fate, survival and revelation, examining the irresistible gravity of the past—how it endures through generations, pervasively present even when buried or forgotten.


]]> 480 Catherine Airey 0063380137 Eric 0 to-read 3.84 2025
author: Catherine Airey
name: Eric
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59644256
Backdoor access to Anom and a series of related investigations granted American, Australian, and European authorities a front-row seat to the underworld. Tens of thousands of criminals worldwide appeared in full view of the same agents they were trying to evade. International smugglers. Money launderers. Hitmen. A sprawling global economy as efficient and interconnected as the legal one. Officers watched drug shipments and murder plots unfold, making arrests without blowing their cover. But, as the FBI started to lose control of Anom, did the agency go too far?

A painstakingly investigated exposé, Dark Wire reveals the true scale and stakes of this unprecedented operation through the agents and crooks who were there. This fly-on-the-wall thriller is a caper for our modern world, where no one can be sure who is listening in.]]> Joseph Cox Eric 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Joseph Cox
name: Eric
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39090430
Our life is brief . . .

Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies.

Or, more precisely, she’s been chosen.

Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, it is their families that pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.]]> 417 Marina Dyachenko Eric 0 to-read 3.98 2007
author: Marina Dyachenko
name: Eric
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211003810 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]> 400 Yangsze Choo 1250266033 Eric 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Eric
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219603154 This evidence-based, user-friendly guide presents a 30-day digital detox plan that will help you set boundaries with your phone and live a more joyful and fulfilling life.

“I wrote The Anxious Generation to help adults improve the lives of children. Many readers have asked me for a version of the book aimed at helping adults and teens help themselves. Catherine Price has written the best such book.”—Jonathan Haidt

Do you feel addicted to your phone? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,� only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Does social media make you anxious? Have you tried to spend less time mindlessly scrolling—and failed? If so, this book is your solution.

Award-winning health and science journalist and TED speaker Catherine Price presents a practical, evidence-based 30-day digital detox plan that will help you break up—and then make up—with your phone. The goal: better mental health, improved screen-life balance, and a long-term relationship with technology that feels good.

This engaging, user-friendly guide explains how our smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive and how the time we spend on them is increasing our anxiety and damaging our abilities to focus, think deeply, form new memories, generate ideas, and be present in our most important relationships. Next, it walks you through an effective and easy-to-follow 30-day plan that has already helped thousands of people worldwide break their phone addictions and feel more fully alive.

Whether you need help for yourself or for your family, friends, students, colleagues, clients, or community, How to Break Up with Your Phone is the ultimate guide to digital detoxing. It’s guaranteed to help you put down your phone—and come back to life.]]> 240 Catherine Price 0593837169 Eric 0 to-read 4.06 2018
author: Catherine Price
name: Eric
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 375802
But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.]]> 324 Orson Scott Card 0812550706 Eric 5 4.31 1985
author: Orson Scott Card
name: Eric
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: the-breakfast-club, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 3284049 The Darkness that Comes Before (#1)
The Warrior Prophet (#2)
The Thousandfold Thought (#3)]]> 640 R. Scott Bakker 1590201191 Eric 4 3.90 2004
author: R. Scott Bakker
name: Eric
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: fantasy, to-read-in-2024, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 214152054 Golden Hill.

In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.

It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on—a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city's secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.]]> 464 Francis Spufford 1668025469 Eric 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Francis Spufford
name: Eric
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210129380
So begins David Bentley Hart’s unprecedented exploration of the mystery of consciousness. Writing in the form of a Platonic dialogue, he systematically subjects the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for four centuries to dialectical interrogation. Powerfully rehabilitating a classical view in which mental acts are irreducible to material causes, he argues, through the gods� exchanges, that the foundation of all reality is spiritual or mental rather than material. The structures of mind, organic life, and even language attest together to an infinite act of intelligence in all things that we may as well call God.

Engaging contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind, free will, revolutions in physics and biology, the history of science, computational models of mind, artificial intelligence, information theory, linguistics, cultural disenchantment, and the metaphysics of nature, Hart calls readers back to an enchanted world in which nature is the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences. He suggests that there is a very special wisdom to be gained when we, in Psyche’s words, “devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines.”]]> 528 David Bentley Hart 0300254725 Eric 0 to-read 4.39
author: David Bentley Hart
name: Eric
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Eric 0 to-read 4.17 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Eric
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60741781 FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

An epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle

In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders—of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides—as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.

Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.]]> 368 Hanna Pylväinen 1250822904 Eric 0 to-read, the-breakfast-club 3.88 2023
author: Hanna Pylväinen
name: Eric
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read, the-breakfast-club
review:

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

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

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most � love and work, community and knowledge � will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Eric 0 to-read 3.58 2025
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Eric
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 77223 The Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future. The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race.]]> 241 P.D. James 0679418733 Eric 4 3.56 1992
author: P.D. James
name: Eric
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: classics, cultural-criticism, economics-and-world-affairs, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 201930181
How humanity came to the planet called Anjiin is lost in the fog of history, but that history is about to end. The Carryx â€� part empire, part hive â€� have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. ĚýNow, they are facing a great and deathless enemy. The key to their survival may rest with the humans of Anjiin. Ěý Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. ĚýThen the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure. ĚýOnly Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to learning to understand â€� and manipulate â€� the Carryx themselves. With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. ĚýHe will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. This is where his story begins.]]> 422 James S.A. Corey 031652557X Eric 4 science-fiction 4.11 2024
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Eric
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: science-fiction
review:

]]> 26367085 560 Miles Cameron 1473208866 Eric 0 to-read 4.24 2016
author: Miles Cameron
name: Eric
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23129080
SOME SEIZE IT

AND SOME HAVE THE WISDOM NEVER TO WIELD IT

The Red Knight has stood against soldiers, against armies and against the might of an empire without flinching. He's fought on real and on magical battlefields alike, and now he's facing one of the greatest challenges yet.

A tournament.

A joyous spring event, the flower of the nobility will present arms and ride against each other for royal favour and acclaim. It's a political contest - and one which the Red Knight has the skill to win. But the stakes may be higher than he thinks. The court of Alba has been infiltrated by a dangerous faction of warlike knights, led by the greatest knight in the world: Jean de Vrailly - and the prize he's fighting for isn't royal favour, but the throne of Alba itself.

Where there is competition there is opportunity; the question is, will the Red Knight take it? Or will the creatures of the Wild seize their chance instead . . .

'A stirring, gritty and at times quite brutal epic fantasy' Tor.com

'This series promises to be the standout epic fantasy for the ages' Fantasy Book Critic]]> 608 Miles Cameron 0575113375 Eric 3 fantasy, read-in-2025 4.34 2015
author: Miles Cameron
name: Eric
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 213562784
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 322 R.F. Kuang 0063250853 Eric 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Eric
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61415863
Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization utilizing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for most of his life. Sam quickly takes to the technology—and so does Angela. Her once deeply philosophical interest in language comes vividly to life through her interactions with Sam. Angela becomes intensely drawn to him, and their relationship soon turns intimate.

When Sam’s family discovers their relationship, they intervene and bring charges. As Angela tells her story from prison in the form of an unrepentant plea, we are plunged into the inner workings of her mind as she rejects all else in pursuit of a more profound understanding of language and humanity. As the sole narrator and perspective giver, Angela’s understanding pushes and pulls us into ambiguity, and a Nabokovian hall of mirrors emerges as she tumbles deeper and deeper into obsession.

Provocative and profound in its exploration of the basis of humanity, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.]]> 240 Jennifer duBois 1639551085 Eric 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Jennifer duBois
name: Eric
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59336841
London, England: Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

River Cartwright, one such “slow horse,� is bitter about his failure and about his tedious assignment transcribing cell phone conversations. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers� connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone has his own agenda.]]> 336 Mick Herron Eric 0 to-read 4.29 2010
author: Mick Herron
name: Eric
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49086125
All that changes one day when, while walking through the woods, Bea meets Cad, a member of the Galdurians, an ancient race thought to be long-extinct. Cad believes that if anyone can help him find his missing people, it’s the Pig Wizard.

But when the two arrive home, the Pig Wizard is nowhere to be found—all that’s left is the Jar of Endless Flame and a mysterious note. Fearing for the Pig Wizard’s safety, Bea and Cad set out across Irpa to find him, while danger fights its way out of the shadows and into the light.

Will these two unexpected friends find the beloved Pig Wizard and prevent eternal darkness from blanketing their world? Or has Irpa truly seen its last sunrise?]]> 247 Tim Probert 0062990462 Eric 0 to-read 4.40 2020
author: Tim Probert
name: Eric
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 68497
For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remade live as equals to humans, Cactacae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.

Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . .]]> 578 China Miéville 0345460014 Eric 0 4.17 2002
author: China Miéville
name: Eric
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 10552338
For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.]]> 1044 Neal Stephenson 0061977969 Eric 4 3.97 2011
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Eric
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: at-apl, economics-and-world-affairs, read-in-2025
review:
Reading was interrupted by the recent ordeal but it’s a sign of healing that I’m reading again.
]]> 54408033 436 Christopher Buehlman Eric 4 And this will be the last book of 2024, the first year I haven’t completed my challenge. I blame it on three weeks in the hospital but nevertheless here we are. I wish you all a fantastic year in books in 2025.]]> 4.24 2012
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Eric
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2024, weird-horror
review:
Really good. Like a serious and intellectual This Present Darkness without the bad theology and fundamentalism.
And this will be the last book of 2024, the first year I haven’t completed my challenge. I blame it on three weeks in the hospital but nevertheless here we are. I wish you all a fantastic year in books in 2025.
]]> 58537332 In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal� when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal� as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Co-written with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.]]> 576 Gabor Maté 0593083881 Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 4.30 2022
author: Gabor Maté
name: Eric
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 1277610 Ěý
But elsewhere, agents of a far greater conflict have made their opening moves.
The Crippled God has been granted a place in the pantheon, a schism threatens and sides must be chosen. Whatever each god decides, the ground-rules have changed, irrevocably, terrifyingly and the first blood spilled will be in the mortal world.
Ěý
A world in which a host of characters, familiar and new, including Heboric Ghost Hands, the possessed Apsalar, Cutter, once a thief now a killer, the warrior Karsa Orlong and the two ancient wanderers Icarium and Mappo--each searching for such a fate as they might fashion with their own hands, guided by their own will. If only the gods would leave them alone. But now that knives have been unsheathed, the gods are disinclined to be kind. There shall be war, war in the heavens. And, the prize? Nothing less than existence itself...
Ěý
Here is the stunning new chapter in Steven Erikson magnificent Malazan Book of the Fallen--hailed asĚýan epic of the imagination and acknowledged as a fantasy classic in the making.]]> 800 Steven Erikson 0765316528 Eric 4 4.43 2006
author: Steven Erikson
name: Eric
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: read-in-2021, read-in-2023, read-in-2024
review:
Yet another good installment from this series. I did find the style of this book a bit irritating. He would switch perspectives every few pages, sometimes within a few paragraphs when I really just wanted to continue with one story line for awhile. The storyline is moved along in some important ways with the future of the story becoming evident. All in all not the best of the series but still very good.
]]> 13152998
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.

A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.]]> 147 Toni Morrison 0307594165 Eric 0 to-read 3.81 2012
author: Toni Morrison
name: Eric
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2893218
All is not well in the Letherii Empire. Rhulad Sengar, the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths, spirals into madness, surrounded by sycophants and agents of his Machiavellian chancellor. Meanwhile, the Letherii secret police conduct a campaign of terror against their own people. The Errant, once a farseeing god, is suddenly blind to the future. Conspiracies seethe throughout the palace, as the empire - driven by the corrupt and self-interested - edges ever-closer to all-out war with the neighboring kingdoms.

The great Edur fleet--its warriors selected from countless numbers of people--draws closer. Amongst the warriors are Karsa Orlong and Icarium Lifestealer--each destined to cross blades with the emperor himself. That yet more blood is to be spilled is inevitable... Against this backdrop, a band of fugitives seek a way out of the empire, but one of them, Fear Sengar, must find the soul of Scabandari Bloodeye. It is his hope that the soul might help halt the Tiste Edur, and so save his brother, the emperor. Yet, traveling with them is Scabandari's most ancient Silchas Ruin, brother of Anomander Rake. And his motives are anything but certain - for the wounds he carries on his back, made by the blades of Scabandari, are still fresh.

Fate decrees that there is to be a reckoning, for such bloodshed cannot go unanswered--and it will be a reckoning on an unimaginable scale. This is a brutal, harrowing novel of war, intrigue and dark, uncontrollable magic; this is epic fantasy at its most imaginative, storytelling at its most thrilling.]]> 1264 Steven Erikson 0765316536 Eric 4 The latest time through and I like this one more each time. The Bonehunter’s marines finally get loosed and no one has greater love they they who lay down their life for their friends. Really like this one. ]]> 4.30 2007
author: Steven Erikson
name: Eric
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/11
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: read-in-2020, read-in-2021, read-in-2023, read-in-2024
review:
Another good book in the series. There were moments of great sadness and emotional and interesting commentary on matters economic and romantic. I was wondering why he spent so much time on some of the sub-plots when they didn't really seem to move the series forward as much as their page counts indicated. Also my copy of the book had numerous typos which was a bit annoying. Over all very good.
The latest time through and I like this one more each time. The Bonehunter’s marines finally get loosed and no one has greater love they they who lay down their life for their friends. Really like this one.
]]> 16158596
Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school's strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Bronte, Eliot, and Lowell--who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Jamieson is brutally ambushed by two strange men in an airport bathroom. Although he has no recollection of anything they claim he's done, it turns out Wil is the key to a secret war between rival factions of poets and is quickly caught in their increasingly deadly crossfire. Pursued relentlessly by people with powers he can barely comprehend and protected by the very man who first attacked him, Wil discovers that everything he thought he knew about his past was fiction. In order to survive, must journey to the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, to discover who he is and why an entire town was blown off the map.

As the two narratives converge, the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless. A brilliant thriller that connects very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data collection to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry's most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.]]> 390 Max Barry 1594205388 Eric 0 to-read 3.90 2013
author: Max Barry
name: Eric
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127278666 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]> 390 Yangsze Choo 1250266017 Eric 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Eric
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 334170 Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the late 1950s.]]> 436 James Baldwin 0679744711 Eric 0 to-read 4.30 1962
author: James Baldwin
name: Eric
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 146199 134 Wendell Berry 0865473315 Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2024 4.01 1988
author: Wendell Berry
name: Eric
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2024
review:

]]> 49882356
Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.]]> 121 Nghi Vo 125075030X Eric 0 to-read 4.00 2020
author: Nghi Vo
name: Eric
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199393033 A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later

Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

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

Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.]]> 352 Rebecca Nagle 0063112043 Eric 0 to-read 4.45 2024
author: Rebecca Nagle
name: Eric
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons � some complicated, some not � so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 Eric 0 to-read 3.44 2024
author: Gillian Anderson
name: Eric
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35133922
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

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

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.]]> 352 Tara Westover 0399590501 Eric 0 to-read 4.46 2018
author: Tara Westover
name: Eric
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56199020
"Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus." "Vaccines are bad for you." These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed--they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In this book, Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill.

Drawing on his own experience--including a visit to a Flat Earth convention--as well as academic research, McIntyre outlines the common themes of science denialism, present in misinformation campaigns ranging from tobacco companies' denial in the 1950s that smoking causes lung cancer to today's anti-vaxxers. He describes attempts to use his persuasive powers as a philosopher to convert Flat Earthers; surprising discussions with coal miners; and conversations with a scientist friend about genetically modified organisms in food. McIntyre offers tools and techniques for communicating the truth and values of science, emphasizing that the most important way to reach science deniers is to talk to them calmly and respectfully--to put ourselves out there, and meet them face to face.]]> 264 Lee McIntyre 0262046105 Eric 0 to-read 3.86 2021
author: Lee McIntyre
name: Eric
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55338982
What makes “cults� so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.� But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,� revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish� everywhere.]]> 309 Amanda Montell 0062993151 Eric 0 to-read 3.83 2021
author: Amanda Montell
name: Eric
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62653934 384 Derek Beres 1039005535 Eric 0 to-read 4.02
author: Derek Beres
name: Eric
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

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

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

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 4.52 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Eric
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 211003982 How a new “woke� elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness� and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong� things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.]]> 432 Musa al-Gharbi 0691232601 Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 4.22
author: Musa al-Gharbi
name: Eric
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Eric 4 Just reread the day after national elections 2024. I can feel Billy Pilgrims disassociation acutely. ]]> 4.10 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Eric
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: science-fiction, classics, to-read-in-2019, cultural-criticism, read-in-2019, the-breakfast-club
review:
Triiippy
Just reread the day after national elections 2024. I can feel Billy Pilgrims disassociation acutely.
]]> 159979
Cover design by Matt Dorfman.]]> 336 Daniel J. Boorstin 0679741801 Eric 0 to-read 4.07 1961
author: Daniel J. Boorstin
name: Eric
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52381770
It worries about the fragile human crew who've grown to trust it, but only where no one can see.

It tells itself that they're only a professional obligation, but when they're captured and an old friend from the past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action.

Drastic action it is, then.

]]> 350 Martha Wells 1250229863 Eric 0 to-read 4.44 2020
author: Martha Wells
name: Eric
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35519109
Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit.

But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue?

And what will become of it when it’s caught?]]> 163 Martha Wells Eric 3 read-in-2024, science-fiction 4.38 2018
author: Martha Wells
name: Eric
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: read-in-2024, science-fiction
review:

]]> 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 Eric 0 to-read 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Eric
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6892991
But an unanticipated discovery shatters their dream and replaces it with a very different one.

The colonists feel sure that their friendship will keep them together. Only then do they begin to realize that they've brought with them rather more than they bargained for. For one of them, it seems, has been hiding a terrible secret from the rest of the company. And when the truth begins to emerge, it soon becomes clear that the war is far from over.]]> 419 K.J. Parker 0316038520 Eric 2 3.15 2008
author: K.J. Parker
name: Eric
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read-in-2024, fantasy, read-in-2024
review:
After the previous books by the author were such a pleasant experience, I guess I was expecting more? I hope I didn’t miss something incredible but this was just okay.
]]> 205478745
This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty poems curated by Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the On Being Project’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Along with each poem, Ó Tuama shares an enriching meditation, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines the profundity of friendship through Langston Hughes� “I Miss My Friend,� the strength of familial bonds in Rita Dove’s “Eurydice Turning,� the power of self-love depicted in Lucille Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate with Me,� and the vitality of our connection to nature in Joy Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.� Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, and complication with care, 40 Poems on Being with Each Other clearly articulates what is at stake in reading it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly our connections with each other, and provides material for grounded and intelligent self-reflection.]]> 368 Pádraig Ó Tuama 1324086165 Eric 0 to-read 4.62
author: Pádraig Ó Tuama
name: Eric
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 184419
As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.]]> 182 G.K. Chesterton 0375757910 Eric 0 to-read 3.85 1908
author: G.K. Chesterton
name: Eric
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1908
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56791389 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B08BKGYQXW


The apocalypse will be televised!

A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.

The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.

Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.

You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big.

You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.]]> 446 Matt Dinniman Eric 0 to-read, to-read-in-2025 4.49 2020
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Eric
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: to-read, to-read-in-2025
review:

]]> 199793431 In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives.

History is a flood. The mighty red . . .

In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Eric 0 to-read 3.79 2024
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Eric
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23272094 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN10: 1857232739 ISBN13: 9781857232738.

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time ...Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones ...And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt ...And everything is about to change ...For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.]]> 279 Iain M. Banks Eric 0 to-read 3.55 1994
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Eric
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45449501
As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge.Ěý

In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.

Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world.

Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.]]> 256 Tyson Yunkaporta 0062975633 Eric 0 to-read 4.35 2019
author: Tyson Yunkaporta
name: Eric
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61885029
Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.]]> 264 John Scalzi 0765389223 Eric 3 read-in-2024, science-fiction 4.09 2023
author: John Scalzi
name: Eric
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: read-in-2024, science-fiction
review:

]]> 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 Eric 0 to-read 3.47 2024
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Eric
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10482146
Let each who reads determine the good and the evil for himself
Athera is besieged by the Mistwraith, which blights the land and dims the mysteries guarded by the last fugitives of the old bloodlines.

But from a prophecy springs hope: the gifts of two brothers � one dark, one fair, raised on opposite sides of a relentless war � when paired may challenge the Mistwraith’s invasion, though at brutal cost�

Arithon, Master of Shadow, musician and mage, commands the power of illusion and darkness. Taken prisoner in battle, his fate falls to his half-brother, Prince Lysaer � a man endowed with the gift of light through the mother they share.

Lysaer is the legitimate son of a king who was betrayed by his queen’s choice to father Arithon by his mortal enemy but that does not save him. Vengeful fury drives the king to banish both Lysaer and Arithon from the world they know to the troubled realms of Athera beyond the Worldsend Gate.

The two exiles are thrown together by hatred and spilled blood � then bound by destiny to champion Athera’s sundered heritage. The highest stakes ride the backlash of their conflict � they must reforge their adverse ideals into balance, or destroy the etheric grace of a culture all but lost to antiquity.]]> 851 Janny Wurts Eric 2 fantasy, read-in-2024 3.69 1993
author: Janny Wurts
name: Eric
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1993
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2024
review:

]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, MieczysĹ‚aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Eric 0 to-read 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Eric
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205363963
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural� death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.]]> 304 Rivers Solomon 0374607133 Eric 0 to-read 3.73 2024
author: Rivers Solomon
name: Eric
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199458188
So begins the life of John the a matchless scholar and scribe of Fulda, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge of the old and new languages of Europe, theology and Church law - and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful (and deadly) currency.

And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known - and loved.]]> 234 Emily Maguire Eric 0 to-read 3.96 2024
author: Emily Maguire
name: Eric
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207599286 Can love make a broken person whole?

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it's as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable: Sylvie, the family's dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

But then darkness from William's past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia's carefully orchestrated plans for their future but the sisters' unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.]]> 387 Ann Napolitano 0593243730 Eric 0 to-read 4.05 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Eric
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Eric 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Eric
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41555932
A legion of Malazan marines is on the march towards Silver Lake. responding to intelligence that indicates the tribes beyond the border are stirring. The marines aren't quite sure what they're going to be facing but, while the Malazan military has evolved and these are not the marines of old, one thing hasn't changed: they'll handle whatever comes at them. Or die trying

Meanwhile, in the high mountains, where dwell the tribes of the Teblor, a new warleader has risen. Scarred by the deeds of Karsa Orlong, he intends to confront his god, even if he has to cut a bloody path through the Malazan Empire to do it. Higher in the mountains, a new threat has emerged, and now the Teblor are running out of time.
The long feared invasion is about to begin. And this time it won't be three simple warriors. This time thousands are poised to flood the lands of the south. And in their way, a single legion of Malazan marines . . .

It seems the past is about to revisit Silver Lake, and that is never a good thing . . .]]> 496 Steven Erikson 0765323591 Eric 4 4.56 2021
author: Steven Erikson
name: Eric
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: fantasy, read-in-2022, to-read-in-2022
review:
First reread. Funnier and more poignant and better than the first time. I’m excited for the next installment.
]]> 49127539 The 16th novel by #1 bestselling author Louise Penny finds Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec investigating a sinister plot in the City of Light

On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand's godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man's life.

When a strange key is found in Stephen's possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d'Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.

It sends them deep into the secrets Armand's godfather has kept for decades.

A gruesome discovery in Stephen's Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.

Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.

For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.]]> 439 Louise Penny 1250145236 Eric 4 4.35 2020
author: Louise Penny
name: Eric
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: crime-fiction, gamache, read-in-2024
review:

]]> 136178991 0 KeigoHigashino Eric 0 to-read 4.23
author: KeigoHigashino
name: Eric
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204642496 Ěý
The outbreak of war changed everything. Maisie trained as a nurse, then left for France to serve at the Front, where she found—and lost—an important part of herself. Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets out on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive. Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but reveals something very different.
Ěý
In the aftermath of the Great War, a former officer has founded a working farm known as The Retreat, that acts as a convalescent refuge for ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. When Fate brings Maisie a second case involving The Retreat, she must finally confront the ghost that has haunted her for over a decade.]]> 352 Jacqueline Winspear 1641296127 Eric 0 to-read 3.99 2003
author: Jacqueline Winspear
name: Eric
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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