Pidge's bookshelf: favorites en-US Sun, 08 Sep 2024 20:54:13 -0700 60 Pidge's bookshelf: favorites 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg White Cat, Black Dog: Stories 61391802 Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.]]> 272 Kelly Link 0593449959 Pidge 5 favorites 3.79 2023 White Cat, Black Dog: Stories
author: Kelly Link
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Pidge 5 favorites 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Pidge 5 favorites 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/23
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Pidge 5 favorites 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Fellowship Point 58438505
Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself?

Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.
]]> 592 Alice Elliott Dark 1982131810 Pidge 5 favorites 3.98 2022 Fellowship Point
author: Alice Elliott Dark
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Time's Mouth 58956757
Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.

Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.

From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time’s Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.]]> 400 Edan Lepucki 164009573X Pidge 5 favorites 4.03 2023 Time's Mouth
author: Edan Lepucki
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois]]> 51183428 Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,� a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.]]> 816 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 006294293X Pidge 5 favorites 4.51 2021 The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/21
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

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

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

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

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Pidge 5 favorites 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/04
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> This Time Tomorrow 59089704 What if you could take a vacation to your past?

With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes, and a different kind of love story.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn't just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it's her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?]]> 310 Emma Straub 052553900X Pidge 5 favorites 3.78 2022 This Time Tomorrow
author: Emma Straub
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/20
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Gingerbread 40634915 Boy, Snow, Bird and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours returns with a bewitching and inventive novel.

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories--equal parts wholesome and uncanny, from the tantalizing witch's house in "Hansel and Gretel" to the man-shaped confection who one day decides to run as fast as he can--beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (and, according to Wikipedia, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. In fact, the world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval--a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, it is a true feast for the reader.]]> 372 Helen Oyeyemi 1984882899 Pidge 5 favorites 3.04 2019 Gingerbread
author: Helen Oyeyemi
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> In the Dream House 52759167 A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.]]> 247 Carmen Maria Machado 1644451026 Pidge 5 favorites 4.30 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/17
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Spinning Silver 36896898 Spinning Silver draws readers deeper into a glittering realm of fantasy, where the boundary between wonder and terror is thinner than a breath, and safety can be stolen as quickly as a kiss.

Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father’s inability to collect his debts has left his family on the edge of poverty—until Miryem takes matters into her own hands. Hardening her heart, the young woman sets out to claim what is owed and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold.

When an ill-advised boast draws the attention of the king of the Staryk—grim fey creatures who seem more ice than flesh—Miryem’s fate, and that of two kingdoms, will be forever altered. Set an impossible challenge by the nameless king, Miryem unwittingly spins a web that draws in a peasant girl, Wanda, and the unhappy daughter of a local lord who plots to wed his child to the dashing young tsar.

But Tsar Mirnatius is not what he seems. And the secret he hides threatens to consume the lands of humans and Staryk alike. Torn between deadly choices, Miryem and her two unlikely allies embark on a desperate quest that will take them to the limits of sacrifice, power, and love.

Channeling the vibrant heart of myth and fairy tale, Spinning Silver weaves a multilayered, magical tapestry that readers will want to return to again and again.]]> 465 Naomi Novik Pidge 5 favorites 4.20 2018 Spinning Silver
author: Naomi Novik
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Girl, Woman, Other 41081373
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.]]> 453 Bernardine Evaristo 0241364906 Pidge 5 favorites 4.27 2019 Girl, Woman, Other
author: Bernardine Evaristo
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/18
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Disoriental 40170500 The story of a young girl and her family, at the core of an exploration of Iranian history.

Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five, with a new life and the prospect of a child, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which reach her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.

In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimiâ herself—punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”—who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.]]> 342 Négar Djavadi 1787700003 Pidge 5 favorites 4.19 2016 Disoriental
author: NĂ©gar Djavadi
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/10
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Salt Houses 30971664 Ěý
Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus;ĚýAlia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world heĚýcan’t escape;ĚýandĚýAlia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam HusseinĚýinvadesĚýKuwait inĚý1990, Alia and her familyĚýonce againĚýlose their home, their land, and their story as they know it,Ěýscattering toĚýBeirut,ĚýParis, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings)Ěýof assimilation in foreign cities.ĚýĚý
Ěý
Lyrical and heartbreaking,ĚýSalt HousesĚýis a remarkableĚýdebut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflictĚýweĚýmightĚýthink we understand—one that asks us toĚýconfrontĚýthat most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.Ěý
]]> 312 Hala Alyan 0544912586 Pidge 5 favorites 4.00 2017 Salt Houses
author: Hala Alyan
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Arsonists' City 48930261
The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.

The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.
Ěý
In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us� (NPR).]]> 464 Hala Alyan 035812655X Pidge 5 favorites 4.31 2021 The Arsonists' City
author: Hala Alyan
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Circe 40195463
When love drives Circe to cast a dark spell, wrathful Zeus banishes her to the remote island of Aiaia. There she learns to harness her occult craft, drawing strength from nature. But she will not always be alone; many are destined to pass through Circe's place of exile, entwining their fates with hers. The messenger god, Hermes. The craftsman, Daedalus. A ship bearing a golden fleece. And wily Odysseus, on his epic voyage home.

There is danger for a solitary woman in this world, and Circe's independence draws the wrath of men and gods alike. To protect what she holds dear, Circe must decide whether she belongs with the deities she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.]]> 400 Madeline Miller Pidge 5 favorites 4.37 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Between the World and Me 25147754 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�
Ěý
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Ěý
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 4 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0147520509 Pidge 5 favorites 4.43 2015 Between the World and Me
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/16
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Get in Trouble 22125258
Link has won an ardent following for her ability to take readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe with each new story. In “The Summer People,� a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,� a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,� a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded in sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.]]> 336 Kelly Link 0804179689 Pidge 5 favorites 3.67 2015 Get in Trouble
author: Kelly Link
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/22
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours]]> 25810500 Ěý
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation?]]> 325 Helen Oyeyemi 1594634637 Pidge 5 favorites 3.65 2016 What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
author: Helen Oyeyemi
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/14
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Pidge 5 favorites 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/10
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Song of Achilles 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller Pidge 5 favorites 4.30 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/21
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crime and Punishment (Signet Classics)]]> 907512 Crime and Punishment is the story of a murder and its consequences--a tale of suspense without equal, set in Russia in the midst of its troubled transition to the modern age. The novel's young protagonist, Raskolnikov, is a sensitive intellectual driven by poverty to believe he was exempt from moral law. In this brilliant translation by the noted scholar and literary critic Sidney Monas, we are privy to the supreme expression of an author who "explored pathological states and the psychology of high tension, the realm of 'obsession' and 'possession,' because it was there one could most clearly and dramatically see the human consequences of an idea carried ruthlessly through to its logical conclusion....For Dostoyevsky, an idea always has skin around it, and a human personality."

An illuminating introduction, written by Leonard J. Stanton and James D. Hardy, Jr., defines the global literary significance of Crime and Punishment, and focuses on the spiritual dimension of the novel as one of a Christian journey in the classic tradition.

Translated and with an Afterword by Sidney Monas]]> 539 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0451527232 Pidge 5 favorites 4.11 1866 Crime and Punishment (Signet Classics)
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at: 2003/10/01
date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> The History of Love 3867
Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives...

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 255 Nicole Krauss 0393328627 Pidge 5 favorites 3.92 2005 The History of Love
author: Nicole Krauss
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2012/05/20
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Americanah 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Pidge 5 favorites 4.32 2013 Americanah
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/25
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Long Division 16129174
Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson--but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985 City, along with his friend and love-object, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet protect his family from the Klan.

City’s two stories ultimately converge in the mysterious work shed behind his grandmother’s, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance.]]> 276 Kiese Laymon 1932841725 Pidge 5 favorites 3.78 2013 Long Division
author: Kiese Laymon
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/01/08
date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Pidge 5 favorites 4.47 2012 The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/14
date added: 2024/09/08
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Pidge 5 favorites 4.38 2013 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/18
date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Pidge 5 favorites 4.47 2014 The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/30
date added: 2024/09/08
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)]]> 9516
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.]]> 153 Marjane Satrapi 037571457X Pidge 5 favorites 4.27 2003 Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Persepolis, #2)]]> 9517 Persepolis, heralded by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the freshest and most original memoirs of our day," Marjane Satrapi dazzled us with her heartrending memoir-in-comic-strips about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Here is the continuation of her fascinating story. In 1984, Marjane flees fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in Vienna. Once there, she faces the trials of adolescence far from her friends and family, and while she soon carves out a place for herself among a group of fellow outsiders, she continues to struggle for a sense of belonging.

Finding that she misses her home more than she can stand, Marjane returns to Iran after graduation. Her difficult homecoming forces her to confront the changes both she and her country have undergone in her absence and her shame at what she perceives as her failure in Austria. Marjane allows her past to weigh heavily on her until she finds some like-minded friends, falls in love, and begins studying art at a university. However, the repression and state-sanctioned chauvinism eventually lead her to question whether she can have a future in Iran.

As funny and poignant as its predecessor, Persepolis 2 is another clear-eyed and searing condemnation of the human cost of fundamentalism. In its depiction of the struggles of growing up--here compounded by Marjane's status as an outsider both abroad and at home--it is raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.]]> 187 Marjane Satrapi 0375714669 Pidge 5 favorites 4.22 2001 Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Persepolis, #2)
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2007/01/02
date added: 2024/09/08
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love]]> 11438 Alternate-cover edition can be found here

In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.]]> 159 Raymond Carver 0679723056 Pidge 5 favorites 4.11 1981 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
author: Raymond Carver
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2004/05/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot DĂ­az 1594489580 Pidge 5 favorites 3.89 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
author: Junot DĂ­az
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2009/12/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Awakening 58345 The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation.

Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work "quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity." Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.]]> 195 Kate Chopin 0543898083 Pidge 5 favorites 3.69 1899 The Awakening
author: Kate Chopin
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1899
rating: 5
read at: 2003/03/01
date added: 2024/09/08
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties]]> 58863 Trace Elements spins a crazy and beautiful narrative that turns tradition on its head while laying flowers at its feet.

Leticia Marisol Estrella Torrez, a university honors graduate, moves north to Los Angeles in an attempt to break from the traditional grandmother who raised her and from Weeping Woman, the Mexican folkloric siren who is said to fly through the skies at night to steal troublesome children and who has courted Leticia since her adolescence.

In Los Angeles, Leticia is quickly immersed in the post-punk, post-Queer hipster scene, and after a short-lived affair with the devastating Edith, Leticia meets K, a tall, dark and handsome Old Spice-wearing lovely from Philadelphia. K and Leticia tumble into "candy heaven" bliss, with, to Leticia's amazement, her nana's blessing. As her confidence in herself and her own sexuality grows, Leticia moves toward an identity that K refers to as "shy bookworm sweater femme boy"-- only to have her newfound happiness brutally shattered by Nana's sudden illness and by the disturbing discovery that K is not as trustworthy as she seems. Vividly wrought, heart-breaking and compelling, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties is a wonderful debut from Felicia Luna Lemus.]]> 256 Felicia Luna Lemus 158005126X Pidge 5 favorites 3.53 2003 Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties
author: Felicia Luna Lemus
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2005/08/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 37380 359 Carson McCullers 0618084746 Pidge 5 favorites 3.99 1940 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
author: Carson McCullers
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2006/01/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Hunger So Wide And So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems]]> 1229080 A Hunger So Wide and So Deep challenges the popular notion that eating problems occur only among white, well-to-do, heterosexual women. Becky W. Thompson shows us how race, class, sexuality, and nationality can shape women's eating problems. Based on in-depth life history interviews with African-American, Latina, and lesbian women, her book chronicles the effects of racism, poverty, sexism, acculturation, and sexual abuse on women's bodies and eating patterns. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep dispels popular stereotypes of anorexia and bulimia as symptoms of vanity and underscores the risks of mislabeling what is often a way of coping with society's own disorders. By featuring the creative ways in which women have changed their unwanted eating patterns and regained trust in their bodies and appetites, Thompson offers a message of hope and empowerment that applies across race, class, and sexual preference.]]> 176 Becky W. Thompson 0816624356 Pidge 5 favorites 4.07 1994 A Hunger So Wide And So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems
author: Becky W. Thompson
name: Pidge
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit]]> 15055
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.

At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.]]> 176 Jeanette Winterson Pidge 5 favorites 3.76 1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Pidge
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: favorites
review:

]]>