en-US Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:32:51 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 176443093
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing� felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.]]> 368 Patric Gagne 166800318X Madeline 0 to-read 3.74 2024
author: Patric Gagne
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 58701854 Theodore John Kaczynski Madeline 0 to-read 3.88 1995
author: Theodore John Kaczynski
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Madeline 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> 57145833
Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age twenty-one, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book.

My Body is a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men's treatment of women and women's rationalizations for accepting that treatment. These essays chronicle moments from Ratajkowski’s life while investigating the culture’s fetishization of girls and female beauty, its obsession with and contempt for women’s sexuality, the perverse dynamics of the fashion and film industries, and the gray area between consent and abuse. Nuanced, fierce, and incisive, My Body marks the debut of a writer brimming with courage and intelligence.]]> 239 Emily Ratajkowski 1250817862 Madeline 4 3.99 2021
author: Emily Ratajkowski
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2021
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> 1845 Librarian's Note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

In April, 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.]]> 207 Jon Krakauer 0385486804 Madeline 4 4.01 1996
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/11/06
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]]> 63068790 *A gripping and powerful memoir reminiscent of Notes on a Scandal, An Education and My Dark Vanessa*

'Engaging and engrossing, frank and frankly troubling, Seventeen is a book not easily forgotten' - Karen Joy Fowler

'​I can’t remember the last time, if ever, a memoir affected me as deeply as Seventeen' - John Boyne

'A powerful tale of lost youth' - Guardian

'Disturbing, powerful and important' - The Times

It’s 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life � smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher � attractive, mid-thirties � takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.  

For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing. 

Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at seventeen. 

'So compelling and shocking that to read it is to have it seared on to you. I felt like I was there. As gripping a memoir as you’ll find' - David Whitehouse

‘A truly impressive and important book� - Ali Millar

'A vivid and moving story, grippingly told' - Alex Renton

'I was addicted to this book' - Lily Dunn

'Gripping [...] a powerful read' - Lucy Nichol]]> 365 Joe Gibson 1398522481 Madeline 0 to-read 4.14 2023
author: Joe Gibson
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Madeline 5 4.45 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 44890081
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.]]> 373 Kate Elizabeth Russell 006294150X Madeline 5 4.09 2020
author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 100698795 A New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Indie Bestseller.

From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.

In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.

For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.

With The Mysteries, Watterson and Kascht share the fascinating genesis of their extraordinary collaboration in a video that can be viewed on Andrews McMeel Publishing's YouTube page.]]> 72 Bill Watterson 1524884944 Madeline 0 to-read 3.76 2023
author: Bill Watterson
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/08
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]]> 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 Madeline 5 4.32 2010
author: Claire Keegan
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/20
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]]> 133518
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.]]> 246 Tim O'Brien 0767902890 Madeline 0 to-read 4.14 1990
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/15
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]]> 6514 294 Sylvia Plath 0571268862 Madeline 5 4.05 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1963
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/15
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]]> 59948520 A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.

It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 382 Alice Winn 0593534565 Madeline 0 to-read 4.51 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/15
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