Nyree's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 19 Mar 2025 23:27:34 -0700 60 Nyree's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Butter 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 Nyree 3 3.51 2017 Butter
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:
Written really beautifully, unfortunately my attention span requires more action and less pages
]]> <![CDATA[Love and Other Thought Experiments]]> 43528427
One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad - but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.

Inspired by some of the best-known thought experiments in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind, Love and Other Thought Experiments is a story of love lost and found across the universe.]]> 272 Sophie Ward Nyree 1 3.57 2020 Love and Other Thought Experiments
author: Sophie Ward
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:
This book was testing me even before I got to the chapter written from the perspective of an ant
]]> <![CDATA[Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail]]> 12262741 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State � and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.]]> 336 Cheryl Strayed 0307592731 Nyree 0 to-read 4.06 2012 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
author: Cheryl Strayed
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants]]> 17465709 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.]]> 408 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1571313354 Nyree 0 to-read 4.52 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Highway Thirteen: Stories 195791203
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims� families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway Thirteen , Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.]]> 272 Fiona McFarlane 0374606269 Nyree 3
I think I’m not a short story girly though, I prefer when books grip me in a chokehold and I can’t put them down.]]> 3.67 2024 Highway Thirteen: Stories
author: Fiona McFarlane
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves:
review:
Really interesting format and such a variety of writing styles.

I think I’m not a short story girly though, I prefer when books grip me in a chokehold and I can’t put them down.
]]> Hello Stranger 61884987 Love isn’t blind, it’s just a little blurry.

Sadie Montgomery never saw what was coming . . . Literally! One minute she’s celebrating the biggest achievement of her life—placing as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society competition—the next, she’s lying in a hospital bed diagnosed with a “probably temporary� condition known as face blindness. She can see, but every face she looks at is now a jumbled puzzle of disconnected features. Imagine trying to read a book upside down and in another language. This is Sadie’s new reality with every face she sees.

But, as she struggles to cope, hang on to her artistic dream, work through major family issues, and take care of her beloved dog, Peanut, she falls into—love? Lust? A temporary obsession to distract from the real problems in her life?—with not one man but two very different ones. The timing couldn’t be worse.

If only her life were a little more in focus, Sadie might be able to find her way. But perceiving anything clearly right now seems impossible. Even though there are things we can only find when we aren’t looking. And there are people who show up when we least expect them. And there are always, always other ways of seeing.]]> 323 Katherine Center 1250283787 Nyree 0 to-read 3.92 2023 Hello Stranger
author: Katherine Center
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Eggshell Skull 39675781
But what if it also works the other way? What if a defendant on trial for sexual crimes has to accept his 'victim' as she comes: a strong, determined accuser who knows the legal system, who will not back down until justice is done?

Bri Lee began her first day of work at the Queensland District Court as a bright-eyed judge's associate. Two years later she was back as the complainant in her own case.

This is the story of Bri's journey through the Australian legal system; first as the daughter of a policeman, then as a law student, and finally as a judge's associate in both metropolitan and regional Queensland-where justice can look very different, especially for women. The injustice Bri witnessed, mourned and raged over every day finally forced her to confront her own personal history, one she'd vowed never to tell. And this is how, after years of struggle, she found herself on the other side of the courtroom, telling her story.

Bri Lee has written a fierce and eloquent memoir that addresses both her own reckoning with the past as well as with the stories around her, to speak the truth with wit, empathy and unflinching courage. Eggshell Skull is a haunting appraisal of modern Australia from a new and essential voice.]]> 358 Bri Lee 1760295779 Nyree 4
A real insight into how cooked the legal system is.]]> 4.35 2018 Eggshell Skull
author: Bri Lee
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:
What a woman, an amazing amount of determination to show while still healing.

A real insight into how cooked the legal system is.
]]> <![CDATA[In the Sea There are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari]]> 10291971
When ten-year-old Enaiatollah Akbari's small village in Afghanistan falls prey to Taliban rule in early 2000, his mother shepherds the boy across the border into Pakistan but has to leave him there all alone to fend for himself. Thus begins Enaiat's remarkable and often punish­ing five-year ordeal, which takes him through Iran, Turkey, and Greece before he seeks political asylum in Italy at the age of fifteen.

Along the way, Enaiat endures the crippling physical and emotional agony of dangerous border crossings, trekking across bitterly cold mountain pathways for days on end or being stuffed into the false bottom of a truck. But not every­one is as resourceful, resilient, or lucky as Enaiat, and there are many heart-wrenching casualties along the way.

Based on Enaiat's close collaboration with Italian novelist Fabio Geda and expertly rendered in English by an award-winning translator, this novel reconstructs the young boy's memories, perfectly preserving the childlike perspective and rhythms of an intimate oral history.

Told with humor and humanity, In the Sea There Are Crocodiles brilliantly captures Enaiat's moving and engaging voice and lends urgency to an epic story of hope and survival.]]> 215 Fabio Geda 0385534736 Nyree 4 3.98 2010 In the Sea There are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari
author: Fabio Geda
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:
The persistence of Enaiatollah is unimaginable, and the excerpts where he interacts with Fabio are so wholesome
]]> All Fours 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 Nyree 3
Did make menopause seem less scary though.]]> 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves:
review:
The jump between graphic descriptions of this woman’s love life and hard core existentialism gave me whiplash.

Did make menopause seem less scary though.
]]> <![CDATA[Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 665 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Nyree 4 4.56 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
I didn’t realise what was missing from my work days until now - soft smut!! Was I productive these past couple days? No. Was I the happiest I’ve ever been at work? Absolutely.
]]> Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens 58894458
Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney � populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights � a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.

But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents� existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to story-telling and how our stories shape who we are.]]> 384 Shankari Chandran 1761150316 Nyree 4 4.15 2022 Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens
author: Shankari Chandran
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Amazing, heart-wrenching, such magical language
]]> <![CDATA[Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics]]> 25135194 Geography shapes not only our history, but where we're headed...

All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to follow world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture.

If you've ever wondered why Putin is so obsessed with Crimea, why the USA was destined to become a global superpower, or why China's power base continues to expand ever outwards, the answers are all here.

In ten chapters and ten maps, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past, present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major factors that determines world history.

It's time to put the 'geo' back into geopolitics.

Ten maps; ten chapters:

Russia * China * United States of America * Latin America * the Middle East * Africa * India and Pakistan * Europe * Japan and Korea * the Arctic]]> 256 Tim Marshall 1783961414 Nyree 0 currently-reading 4.18 2015 Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics
author: Tim Marshall
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist]]> 27833843
From serial killer to natural disaster, 'perfect murder' to freak accident, Shepherd takes nothing for granted in pursuit of truth. And while he's been involved in some of the most high-profile cases of recent times, it's often the less well known encounters that prove the most perplexing, intriguing and even bizarre. In or out of the public eye, his evidence has put killers behind bars, freed the innocent and turned open-and-shut cases on their heads.

But a life in death, bearing witness to some of humanity's darkest corners, exacts a price and Shepherd doesn't flinch from counting the cost to him and his family.]]> 400 Richard Shepherd 0718182715 Nyree 4 4.32 2018 Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist
author: Richard Shepherd
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Oooo-wee I love learning about the different ways bodies decompose
]]> Love Stories 58464268
A blind man yearns to see the face of his wife of thirty years. A divorced mother has a secret love affair with a travelling priest. A widower miraculously finds a three-minute video recorded by his wife before she died. A tree lopper's heart falls in a forest. A working mum contemplates taking the photographs of her late husband down from the fridge. A girl writes her last letter to the man she loves, then sets it on fire. An ageing gigolo regrets the one that got away. A palliative care nurse helps a dying woman converse with the angel at the end of her bed. A renowned 100-year-old scientist ponders the one great earthly puzzle he was never able to solve: 'What is love?'

Endless stories. Human stories. Love stories.

Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, bestselling author � and one of Australia's finest journalists � Trent Dalton spent two months in 2021 pounding city pavements, speaking to Australians from all walks of life and asking them one simple and direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' For two straight weeks he sat at a desk with a sky-blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter, on the bustling corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, Brisbane, with a sign saying, 'Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?'

The result is Love Stories � a warm, wise, poignant, funny and moving book about love in all its guises, including stories, observations and reflections on lovers in parks; people in cemeteries, hospital wards, pubs and bingo halls; and newlyweds walking out of registry offices. There will be stories of people falling into love, falling out of love, and never letting go of the loved ones in their hearts. And woven through it all will be remembrances of Trent's own special moments, and of the people whose love stories have made him the man and writer he is today.

A heartfelt, deep, funny, wise and tingly tribute to the greatest thing we will never understand and the only thing we will ever really need: love.]]> 352 Trent Dalton 146076093X Nyree 2 4.12 2021 Love Stories
author: Trent Dalton
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Really did not get into this as much as I feel like I should have. Some of the stories were so sweet but some of the writing really frustrated me
]]> Fish of the Seto Inland Sea 2981076 432 Ruri Pilgrim 0006531334 Nyree 3 3.60 1999 Fish of the Seto Inland Sea
author: Ruri Pilgrim
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Really interesting read, easy language, unfortunately it took me too long to read and there were so many characters I forgot which were which by the time I got to the end
]]> <![CDATA[I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist]]> 197363973 The sequel to the Sunday Times and international-bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by International Booker Prize-shortlisted Anton Hur

When Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist, her hope was to create a reference for herself. She never imagined she would reach so many people, especially young people, with her reflections. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki became a runaway bestseller in South Korea, Indonesia, and the U.S., and reached a community of readers who appreciated depression and anxiety being discussed with such intimacy. Baek's struggle with dysthymia continues in I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki. And healing is a difficult process; the inner conflict she experiences in treatment becomes more complex, more challenging. With this second book, Baek Sehee reaches out to hold the hands of all those for whom grappling with everyday despair is part of a lifelong project, part of the journey.]]> 224 Baek Se-hee 1639732306 Nyree 3 3.60 2019 I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist
author: Baek Se-hee
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Mad respect for publishing your therapy sessions
]]> Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 26074156 New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.�

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,� Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.]]> 306 Roxane Gay 0062362593 Nyree 0 to-read 4.17 2017 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
author: Roxane Gay
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]]> 41104077
Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women�, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.]]> 448 Caroline Criado Pérez 1419729071 Nyree 0 to-read 4.35 2019 Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
author: Caroline Criado PĂ©rez
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Green Dot 127282597
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.]]> 320 Madeleine Gray 1250890594 Nyree 0 to-read 3.62 2024 Green Dot
author: Madeleine Gray
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control]]> 52665079 THE PILL

Changes your brain
Alters your stress response
Can increase your risk of depression
Affects your choice of mate selection

Hormonal birth control is taken by millions of women around the world every day. Yet until recently we knew very little about how the Pill affects the non-reproductive systems of the female body, because research on these other systems was conducted almost exclusively on men. In her trailblazing book, Dr Sarah Hill uses the latest science to reveal how the Pill is changing women and the world, for better and worse. She puts the power back in your hands to make smarter, more informed choices about your health and your hormones.


IT'S EVERYTHING YOUR DOCTOR NEVER TOLD YOU

]]> 320 Sarah E. Hill Nyree 0 to-read 4.01 2019 How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control
author: Sarah E. Hill
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself]]> 123923887 From TikTok star Eli Rallo, an irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and searingly honest take on modern dating and romance with tips, tricks, and survival-guide style rules.

I Didn’t Know I Needed This is the dose of confidence every girl needs to live their life on their own terms. Eli Rallo is a social media superstar, a Carrie Bradshaw for the TikTok age, a true romantic at heart, and the best friend every young woman wishes she had. As someone who prides herself in feeling fully and deeply, Eli is on the ride with you, kissing the frogs, sending (and deleting) the risky DMs, climbing down frat house gutters, making the friends you’ll have for life, all while finding love and falling in love with yourself and learning that everything will be alright. In this earnest and vulnerable look at what it’s really like to date as a young woman in the modern world of dating apps, rotating rosters, and social media snafus, Eli gives her rules for each stage of the game—tried and true tricks of the trade.

I Didn't Know I Needed This follows the natural lifecycle of dating, starting with being single, flirting, and navigating the apps to going on dates, having sex, falling in love, and managing relationships, to finally dealing with heartbreak, finding closure, prioritizing your friends, and honoring your life.

Discover the rules that have worked for her, and garnered her more than a half million TikTok With touching stories of her own adventures and mishaps, Eli helps you navigate dating in a way that’s frank, honest, funny, and relatable, giving the advice that you didn’t even know you needed.]]> 320 Eli Rallo 0063298465 Nyree 0 to-read 3.34 2023 I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself
author: Eli Rallo
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother]]> 29209
Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. "Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion--and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents' loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.

At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all-black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. "God is the color of water," Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life's blessings and life's values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth's determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college--and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.

Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self-realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.]]> 291 James McBride 1573225789 Nyree 4 4.13 1995 The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
author: James McBride
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/06/27
shelves:
review:
Written well, Ruth would make a fantastic brunch companion
]]> The Book of Doors 156480764
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book - an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .

What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.

But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There are other books that can do wondrous and dreadful things when wielded by dangerous and ruthless individuals - individuals who crave what Cassie now possesses.

Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is, it seems, Drummond Fox. He is a man fleeing his own demons - a man with his own secret library of magical books that he has hidden away in the shadows for safekeeping. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all . . .

Because some doors should never be opened.]]> 408 Gareth Brown 1787637247 Nyree 0 4.04 2024 The Book of Doors
author: Gareth Brown
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry]]> 57809448 183 Richard Flanagan 1761044389 Nyree 0 4.29 2021 Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tracks by Davidson, Robyn published by Vintage (1995)]]> 133048685 0 Robyn Davidson Nyree 0 4.22 Tracks by Davidson, Robyn published by Vintage (1995)
author: Robyn Davidson
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Piglet 127282554 A New York Times Book Review Editors� Choice
A Belletrist Book Club Pick

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.]]> 320 Lottie Hazell 125028984X Nyree 0 3.40 2024 Piglet
author: Lottie Hazell
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Foster 8143909
Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.]]> 89 Claire Keegan 0571255655 Nyree 0 to-read 4.32 2010 Foster
author: Claire Keegan
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Nyree 0 to-read 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Nyree
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Nyree 0 to-read 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Nyree
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>