Christine's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 27 Jan 2025 23:03:35 -0800 60 Christine's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Willa's New World 18590109 Barbara Demers Christine 4 childrens, canada 3.08 1999 Willa's New World
author: Barbara Demers
name: Christine
average rating: 3.08
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: childrens, canada
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin]]> 29585023
Like a famous brand of crisps, these stories are addictive.

Read one, the saying goes, and you’ll be stuck reading seven.

In fact, Mulla Nasrudin jokes function like memes � working their way into the fabric of society, subtly influencing thought.

They have no calories, so indulge without guilt!]]> 126 Idries Shah 1784790060 Christine 5 4.00 1974 The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin
author: Idries Shah
name: Christine
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2019/08/13
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: 2019, short-stories, storytelling
review:

]]> Origin (Robert Langdon, #5) 40338438
But the meticulously orchestrated evening suddenly erupts into chaos, and Kirsch's precious discovery teeters on the brink of being lost forever. Facing an imminent threat, Langdon is forced to flee. With him is Ambra Vidal, the elegant museum director who worked with Kirsch. They travel to Barcelona on a perilous quest to locate a cryptic password that will unlock Kirsch's secret.

Navigating the dark corridors of hidden history and extreme re-ligion, Langdon and Vidal must evade an enemy whose all-knowing power seems to emanate from Spain's Royal Palace. They uncover clues that ultimately bring them face-to-face with Kirsch's shocking discovery...and the breathtaking truth that has long eluded us.]]> 696 Dan Brown 0525563709 Christine 0 2018, book-candy 3.96 2017 Origin (Robert Langdon, #5)
author: Dan Brown
name: Christine
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2018/08/15
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: 2018, book-candy
review:

]]> The Joy Luck Club 563002
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.]]> 332 Amy Tan 0804106304 Christine 4 3.88 1989 The Joy Luck Club
author: Amy Tan
name: Christine
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family]]> 58932464
From the award-winning author of Five Star Billionaire and We, The Survivors comes a whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage.

If we are lucky we will find writing that grips us with its vitality, beauty and significance - Strangers on a Pier is like that� Deborah Levy

In Strangers on a Pier, acclaimed author Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation, which is reflected in his own face. From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, to his grandfathers' treacherous boat journeys to Malaysia from mainland China in the 1920s, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity night clubs, and voices in a dizzying variety of languages, dialects, and slangs, to create an intricate and astoundingly vivid portrait of a place caught between the fast-approaching future and a past that won't let go.]]> 96 Tash Aw 0008421277 Christine 0 to-read 4.29 2016 Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family
author: Tash Aw
name: Christine
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Year of Wonders 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Christine 3 2014 4.00 2001 Year of Wonders
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Christine
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/11/11
shelves: 2014
review:

]]> Study for Obedience 123636870
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 192 Sarah Bernstein 1039009069 Christine 2
The writing is amazing. I've underlined passages on nearly every page, but in the end I would have a very hard time telling anyone what this book is about or what it is trying to achieve. I'm trying to read the Booker Short List before prize day but only got the books mid October. This is 1/6 and my vote would be to read the next book.]]> 3.02 2023 Study for Obedience
author: Sarah Bernstein
name: Christine
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/10/24
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves:
review:
I read the entire book ready to suspend my disbelief and my need for a location or a plot or even a clear character, but there was no resolution. Which is a choice, but not one that worked for me this time.

The writing is amazing. I've underlined passages on nearly every page, but in the end I would have a very hard time telling anyone what this book is about or what it is trying to achieve. I'm trying to read the Booker Short List before prize day but only got the books mid October. This is 1/6 and my vote would be to read the next book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Boy from the Woods (Wilde, #1)]]> 51204046
No one seems to take Naomi Pine's disappearance seriously, not even her father-with one exception. Hester Crimstein, a television criminal attorney, knows through her grandson that Naomi was relentlessly bullied at school. Hester asks Wilde-with whom she shares a tragic connection-to use his unique skills to help find Naomi.

Wilde can't ignore an outcast in trouble, but in order to find Naomi he must venture back into the community where he has never fit in, a place where the powerful are protected even when they harbor secrets that could destroy the lives of millions . . . secrets that Wilde must uncover before it's too late.]]> 371 Harlan Coben 1538748142 Christine 0 3.84 2020 The Boy from the Woods (Wilde, #1)
author: Harlan Coben
name: Christine
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2021/05/24
date added: 2023/10/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Have Always Lived in the Castle]]> 11161779 Alternate Cover Edition can be found here

Merricat Blackwood lives on the family estate with her sister Constance and her uncle Julian. Not long ago there were seven Blackwoods—until a fatal dose of arsenic found its way into the sugar bowl one terrible night. Acquitted of the murders, Constance has returned home, where Merricat protects her from the curiousity and hostility of the villagers. Their days pass in happy isolation until cousin Charles appears. Only Merricat can see the danger, and she must act swiftly to keep Constance from his grasp.

The illustration on the cover of this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition is by Thomas Ott.]]> 162 Shirley Jackson Christine 0 currently-reading 3.90 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Christine
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Severance 38472277 Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.]]> 267 Ling Ma 0374717117 Christine 0 3.93 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Christine
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/09
date added: 2023/10/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Oblomov 254308 586 Ivan Goncharov 1933480092 Christine 0 to-read 4.09 1859 Oblomov
author: Ivan Goncharov
name: Christine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1859
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Fat Years 11448281 320 Chan Koonchung 1409044114 Christine 4 2013 3.37 2009 The Fat Years
author: Chan Koonchung
name: Christine
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2013/02/23
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: 2013
review:
So, take away the literary merit part of this book and let's talk about what it talks about. That would be the current state of affairs in China. That alone is a reason to read it. Go - read it!
]]> <![CDATA[A Subtle Murder (Rose Beckingham, #1)]]> 43391728
When Rose Beckingham sets sail for England in the summer of 1926, she brings more than souvenirs from her years in India. She carries the memory of a family tragedy and a secret so terrible it could destroy the new life she hopes to build in London.

But Rose isn’t the only passenger aboard the RMS Star of India with something to hide. Halfway across the Arabian Sea, death strikes and a murderer begins a deadly game only Rose can hope to end.

With a mysterious Frenchman haunting her steps, can Rose outrun her past? And can she stay alive long enough to decipher the clues left by a taunting killer? Or will murder call again before the first port?]]> 210 Blythe Baker Christine 0 currently-reading 3.87 2018 A Subtle Murder (Rose Beckingham, #1)
author: Blythe Baker
name: Christine
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/31
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1)]]> 15196
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.]]> 159 Art Spiegelman 0394541553 Christine 0 4.39 1986 Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1)
author: Art Spiegelman
name: Christine
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West]]> 76401 The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. For this elegant thirtieth-anniversary edition—published in both hardcover and paperback—Brown has contributed an incisive new preface.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.]]> 509 Dee Brown 0805066691 Christine 0 4.24 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
author: Dee Brown
name: Christine
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary]]> 25019 The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.]]> 242 Simon Winchester 0060839783 Christine 0 3.84 1998 The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
author: Simon Winchester
name: Christine
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present]]> 2767 Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignored

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s book “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”]]> 729 Howard Zinn 0060838655 Christine 0 4.07 1980 A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present
author: Howard Zinn
name: Christine
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Keturah and Lord Death 331830 216 Martine Leavitt 1932425292 Christine 0 to-read 3.90 2006 Keturah and Lord Death
author: Martine Leavitt
name: Christine
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Klara and the Sun 62799943 A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!

A magnificent new novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro—author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.

Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 418 Kazuo Ishiguro Christine 0 currently-reading 3.99 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Christine
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Inglorious Empire 35997465
British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial 'gift' - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy.]]> 336 Shashi Tharoor 0141987146 Christine 0 to-read 4.09 2016 Inglorious Empire
author: Shashi Tharoor
name: Christine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Homicide and Halo-Halo (Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, #2)]]> 58082198
To add to her feelings of sticky unease, Lila's little town of Shady Palms has resurrected the Miss Teen Shady Palms Beauty Pageant, which she won many years ago--a fact that serves as a wedge between Lila and her cousin slash rival, Bernadette. But when the head judge of the pageant is murdered and Bernadette becomes the main suspect, the two must put aside their differences and solve the case--because it looks like one of them might be next.]]> 279 Mia P. Manansala 0593201698 Christine 0 to-read 3.66 2022 Homicide and Halo-Halo (Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, #2)
author: Mia P. Manansala
name: Christine
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth]]> 58735007
Over the past twenty-five years, the directors of The Moth have worked with people from all walks of life—including astronauts, hairdressers, rock stars, a retired pickpocket, high school students, and Nobel Prize winners—to develop true personal stories that have moved and delighted live audiences and listeners of The Moth’s Peabody Award–winning radio hour and podcast. A leader in the modern storytelling movement, The Moth inspires thousands of people around the globe to share their stories each year.

Now, with How to Tell a Story, The Moth will help you learn how to uncover and craft your own unique stories, like Moth storytellers Mike Birbiglia, Rosanne Cash, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Padma Lakshmi, Darryl “DMC� McDaniels, Hasan Minhaj, Tig Notaro, Boots Riley, Betty Reid Soskin, John Turturro, and more.

Whether your goal is to make it to the Moth stage, deliver the perfect wedding toast, wow clients at a business dinner, give a moving eulogy, ace a job interview, be a hit at parties, change the world, or simply connect more deeply to those around you, stories are essential. Sharing secrets of The Moth’s time-honed process and using examples from beloved storytellers, a team of Moth directors will show you how to

� mine your memories for your best stories
� explore structures that will boost the impact of your story
� deliver your stories with confidence
� tailor your stories for any occasion

Filled with empowering, easy-to-follow tips for crafting stories that forge lasting bonds with friends, family, and colleagues alike, this book will help you connect authentically with the world around you and unleash the power of story in your life.]]> 336 Meg Bowles 0593139003 Christine 0 to-read 3.83 2022 How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth
author: Meg Bowles
name: Christine
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Leave the World Behind 50358031
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?]]> 241 Rumaan Alam 0062667637 Christine 0 to-read 3.13 2020 Leave the World Behind
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Christine
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Lote 52867796 Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold’s decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the ‘Bright Young Things� of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists� residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists� residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions?

From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.]]> 460 Shola von Reinhold 1913090116 Christine 0 to-read 4.07 2020 Lote
author: Shola von Reinhold
name: Christine
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Scarborough 31945128 272 Catherine Hernandez 1551526778 Christine 0 currently-reading 4.28 2017 Scarborough
author: Catherine Hernandez
name: Christine
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/07
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Girl in Red 42881101 A postapocalyptic take on the perennial classic "Little Red Riding Hood", about a woman who isn't as defenseless as she seems.

It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago.

There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Sometimes, there are men. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there's something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined.

Red doesn't like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn't about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods....]]> 293 Christina Henry 0451492285 Christine 0 to-read 3.69 2019 The Girl in Red
author: Christina Henry
name: Christine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Summary: Manage Your Day-to-Day -: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series)]]> 31697743 28 Sunny Akins 1533563837 Christine 0 to-read 3.64 Summary: Manage Your Day-to-Day -: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series)
author: Sunny Akins
name: Christine
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020]]> 57190774
If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.

These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.]]> 576 David Sedaris 0316558796 Christine 5 humor, memoir, writing
But why?

The main reason is that Sedaris sees the humor in every day life. He watches the world around him and records it from his perspective. As a storyteller with a particular interest in telling and helping others tell personal stories, I can't help but be charmed by this and impressed by the way Sedaris goes through life.

What surprised me was the degree to which he's provoking people around him in order to create humorous or shocking (and he leans towards the latter) situations at the expense of others. It's as if as he got older, his internal dialogue lost its filter. It was no longer enough to wonder how one might respond to a provoking comment, but time to try it out and see the look on their faces. While the writing is good, this way of being in the world can be mean to people and I wonder if that's worth it.

As I read through 500 pages of extracts, I was struck over and over again by the fact that this is exactly the extracts. The daily discipline and work that it takes to create this much material is impressive. It speaks to someone who sits themselves down to do the work no matter what. There's a valuable lesson there for anyone who wants to write and write better, no matter your genre or topic.]]> 4.17 2021 A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020
author: David Sedaris
name: Christine
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/15
date added: 2022/03/15
shelves: humor, memoir, writing
review:
I love David Sedaris, so I was bound to enjoy this second part of his Diaries, and I did.

But why?

The main reason is that Sedaris sees the humor in every day life. He watches the world around him and records it from his perspective. As a storyteller with a particular interest in telling and helping others tell personal stories, I can't help but be charmed by this and impressed by the way Sedaris goes through life.

What surprised me was the degree to which he's provoking people around him in order to create humorous or shocking (and he leans towards the latter) situations at the expense of others. It's as if as he got older, his internal dialogue lost its filter. It was no longer enough to wonder how one might respond to a provoking comment, but time to try it out and see the look on their faces. While the writing is good, this way of being in the world can be mean to people and I wonder if that's worth it.

As I read through 500 pages of extracts, I was struck over and over again by the fact that this is exactly the extracts. The daily discipline and work that it takes to create this much material is impressive. It speaks to someone who sits themselves down to do the work no matter what. There's a valuable lesson there for anyone who wants to write and write better, no matter your genre or topic.
]]> <![CDATA[Em's Awful Good Fortune: A Novel]]> 57486339 Em’s Awful Good Fortune is a deeply personal, marriage-coming-apart-at-the-seams look at the struggle between a woman’s desire for partnership and her need for identity. Fueled by twin demons, love and rage, Em stomps her way around the world, coming to terms with the fantasy of having it all: husband, kids, and a career. Em is not just married; it’s more like being handcuffed to her husband’s international career. Her life reads like a fantasy, bouncing between Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul. But the good fortune is all her husband’s; Em is just the tag-along wife.

Marcie Maxfield’s compelling, non-linear story explores the expatriate lifestyle through the lens of a crumbling marriage, while at the same time tracing the lasting impact of sexual assault and post-traumatic stress disorder. Em’s journey exposes the dark corners of this seemingly privileged world: loneliness, depression, infidelity, and loss of career. As she begins to value her needs before those of her husband’s career, she stops letting herself be dragged along for the ride—and ultimately emerges triumphant.]]> 250 Marcie Maxfield 1647421438 Christine 0 4.12 Em's Awful Good Fortune: A Novel
author: Marcie Maxfield
name: Christine
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/09
date added: 2022/03/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Pippa Park Raises Her Game 50268629
Life is full of great expectations for Korean American Pippa Park.It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look. So when Pippa gets a surprising basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself.

At Lakeview, Pippa struggles with popularity and the pressure to perform academically and athletically while keeping her past and family’s laundromat a secret from her elite new classmates. Juggling jealous Queen Bees, old and new friends, her own place at Lakeview, and an unrequited crush on the school's most handsome� and most haughty� 8th grader is hard enough. But when Pippa begins to receive a string of hateful, anonymous messages via social media that threaten to unmask her carefully built persona, things begin to spiral out ofcontrol.

With pressure mounting, Pippa discovers the real reason she was admitted to Lakeview Private, and wonders if she can keep her old and new lives separate, or if she should even try.]]> 278 Erin Yun 1944020276 Christine 0 currently-reading 4.52 2020 Pippa Park Raises Her Game
author: Erin Yun
name: Christine
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The New Kid 11473073 290 Mavis Jukes Christine 0 currently-reading 3.92 2011 The New Kid
author: Mavis Jukes
name: Christine
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Lost Apothecary 53288434 A female apothecary secretly dispenses poisons to liberate women from the men who have wronged them - setting three lives across centuries on a dangerous collision course.

Rule #1: The poison must never be used to harm another woman.
Rule #2: The names of the murderer and her victim must be recorded in the apothecary’s register.

One cold February evening in 1791, at the back of a dark London alley in a hidden apothecary shop, Nella awaits her newest customer. Once a respected healer, Nella now uses her knowledge for a darker purpose - selling well-disguised poisons to desperate women who would kill to be free of the men in their lives. But when her new patron turns out to be a precocious twelve-year-old named Eliza Fanning, an unexpected friendship sets in motion a string of events that jeopardizes Nella’s world and threatens to expose the many women whose names are written in her register.

In present-day London, aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell spends her tenth wedding anniversary alone, reeling from the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. When she finds an old apothecary vial near the river Thames, she can’t resist investigating, only to realize she’s found a link to the unsolved “apothecary murders� that haunted London over two centuries ago. As she deepens her search, Caroline’s life collides with Nella’s and Eliza’s in a stunning twist of fate - and not everyone will survive.]]> 301 Sarah Penner 0778311015 Christine 3
In short, two timelines, one contemporary and one in the 1700s. Set pieces include a hidden room, mudlarking in the Thames, poison, the British Library, and London. It's the story of three women in vastly different circumstances and times trying to save themselves from both their circumstances and their choices. Mystery and surprises abound.

To my surprise, the past characters felt more real to me than the contemporary characters. The characters set in the past had back stories that felt not more detailed, but more emotionally authentic. The contemporary character's story had more details, but felt thin. She was a trope of women who make certain choices and experience a certain kind of regret.

The plot was great. The writing felt overworked in some places, I suspect more to do with this being Penner's first novel than any lack of skill. It was more a case of a couple rough patches than bad writing. Her research was fantastic and the way she evoked historic London, both in its time and its traces in modern London, were lovely.

A good quick read and I'd keep an eye out for Penner's next book for sure.]]> 3.72 2021 The Lost Apothecary
author: Sarah Penner
name: Christine
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/23
date added: 2022/02/24
shelves: library-book, historical-fiction
review:
Picked this up off the library's hot reads shelf and was pleasantly surprised.

In short, two timelines, one contemporary and one in the 1700s. Set pieces include a hidden room, mudlarking in the Thames, poison, the British Library, and London. It's the story of three women in vastly different circumstances and times trying to save themselves from both their circumstances and their choices. Mystery and surprises abound.

To my surprise, the past characters felt more real to me than the contemporary characters. The characters set in the past had back stories that felt not more detailed, but more emotionally authentic. The contemporary character's story had more details, but felt thin. She was a trope of women who make certain choices and experience a certain kind of regret.

The plot was great. The writing felt overworked in some places, I suspect more to do with this being Penner's first novel than any lack of skill. It was more a case of a couple rough patches than bad writing. Her research was fantastic and the way she evoked historic London, both in its time and its traces in modern London, were lovely.

A good quick read and I'd keep an eye out for Penner's next book for sure.
]]> Devotion 57865361 Prussia, 1836. Hanne is nearly fifteen and the domestic world of womanhood is quickly closing in on her. A child of nature, she yearns instead for the rush of the river, the wind dancing around her. Hanne finds little comfort in the local girls and friendship doesn't come easily, until she meets Thea and she finds in her a kindred spirit and finally, acceptance.

Hanne's family are Old Lutherans, and in her small village hushed worship is done secretly - this is a community under threat. But when they are granted safe passage to Australia, the community rejoices: at last a place they can pray without fear, a permanent home. Freedom.

It's a promise of freedom that will have devastating consequences for Hanne and Thea, but, on that long and brutal journey, their bond proves too strong for even nature to break...]]> 432 Hannah Kent 1509863915 Christine 0 to-read 3.83 2021 Devotion
author: Hannah Kent
name: Christine
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Midnight Library 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 Christine 4 library-book
48 hour read.]]> 3.96 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Christine
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/17
date added: 2022/02/22
shelves: library-book
review:
Quick fun read. Thought-provoking way to illustrate the theory of infinite possible lives we could be (are?) living.

48 hour read.
]]> <![CDATA[Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered]]> 18290401 In his New York Times bestseller Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon showed readers how to unlock their creativity by “stealing� from the community of other movers and shakers. Now, in an even more forward-thinking and necessary book, he shows how to take that critical next step on a creative journey—getting known.

Show Your Work! is about why generosity trumps genius. It’s about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time “networking.� It’s not self-promotion, it’s self-discovery—let others into your process, then let them steal from you. Filled with illustrations, quotes, stories, and examples, Show Your Work! offers ten transformative rules for being open, generous, brave, productive.

In chapters such as You Don’t Have to Be a Genius; Share Something Small Every Day; and Stick Around, Kleon creates a user’s manual for embracing the communal nature of creativity� what he calls the “ecology of talent.� From broader life lessons about work (you can’t find your voice if you don’t use it) to the etiquette of sharing—and the dangers of oversharing—to the practicalities of Internet life (build a good domain name; give credit when credit is due), it’s an inspiring manifesto for succeeding as any kind of artist or entrepreneur in the digital age.

]]> 215 Austin Kleon 076117897X Christine 5 creativity
Here's the thing - in the end you just need to do the thing. You need to make. You need to share. You need to do it consistently. You can go looking for all kinds of advice on how and why and what and Kleon is a wonderful source of inspiration, but in the end you have to do.

What I like most about Kleon's work is the fact that he uses commands as titles. They've got 10 simple steps each and all of them boil down to some version of now put this book down and do it. You've got to do if you want to create. Do, do a lot, and show people.

The books are great. The writing and visuals are wonderful. But in the end, you've got to do. Put the book down and do. That's what I learned.]]> 4.09 2014 Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
author: Austin Kleon
name: Christine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: creativity
review:
Just get them all. Read them all. Read them again. Follow the advice.

Here's the thing - in the end you just need to do the thing. You need to make. You need to share. You need to do it consistently. You can go looking for all kinds of advice on how and why and what and Kleon is a wonderful source of inspiration, but in the end you have to do.

What I like most about Kleon's work is the fact that he uses commands as titles. They've got 10 simple steps each and all of them boil down to some version of now put this book down and do it. You've got to do if you want to create. Do, do a lot, and show people.

The books are great. The writing and visuals are wonderful. But in the end, you've got to do. Put the book down and do. That's what I learned.
]]> Petty Theft 18465536 A hilarious romantic comedy about kleptomania and booklovers

Pascal is in a bad place. He’s out of work, he and his longtime girlfriend have just broken up, and when he goes out for a run to ease his frazzled nerves, he falls and injures his back so badly thathe’s strictly forbidden from running. What’s an endorphin-loving cartoonist to do? In a bid to distract himself, Pascal throws himself into his other pleasure: reading. And while at the bookstore one day, he spies a young woman picking up his own book. But then she darts out of the shop without paying. Bemused, he decides to figure out why she did it.

Petty Theft showcases the wry, self-aware with Pascal Girard became known for in his books éܲԾDz and Bigfoot.]]> 100 Pascal Girard 1770461523 Christine 4 library-book, graphic-novel 3.26 2014 Petty Theft
author: Pascal Girard
name: Christine
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: library-book, graphic-novel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)]]> 40591677
In his previous books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! , both New York Times bestsellers, Austin Kleon gave readers the keys to unlock their creativity and showed them how to become known. Now he offers his most inspiring work yet, with ten simple rules for how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself—for life.

The creative life is not a linear journey to a finish line, it’s a loop—so find a daily routine, because today is the only day that matters. Disconnect from the world to connect with yourself—sometimes you just have to switch into airplane mode. Keep Going celebrates getting outdoors and taking a walk (as director Ingmar Bergman told his daughter, ”The demons hate fresh air�). Pay attention, and especially pay attention to what you pay attention to. Worry less about getting things done, and more about the worth of what you’re doing. Instead of focusing on making your mark, work to leave things better than you found them.

Keep Going and its timeless, practical, and ethical principles are for anyone trying to sustain a meaningful and productive life.
]]> 224 Austin Kleon 1523506644 Christine 5 creativity, non-fiction 4.26 2019 Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)
author: Austin Kleon
name: Christine
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: creativity, non-fiction
review:
Third book in the series. Works wonderfully. I absolutely devour his books and own them as well because I will go back to them.
]]> <![CDATA[The Housekeeper and the Professor]]> 3181564
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.]]> 180 Yōko Ogawa 0312427808 Christine 4 4.04 2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Christine
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: library-book, japan, asian-lit
review:
Enjoyed this read so much. Her dedication to making his life as pleasant as possible. The sweetness and the undercurrent of loss. Wonderful read.
]]> In the Dream House 43317482 251 Carmen Maria Machado 1644450038 Christine 5 lgbtq, women, fairytale
I heard wonderful things about this book as a deeply moving and disturbing story. It is. I heard about it as an example of second person writing that works. It is.

What I didn't expect was a text infused with fairy tales and folk tales in spirit and language.

In a series of short pieces (you can't call them stories), Machado tells the story of her relationship and how it broke her and how she eventually broke out. It is not easy reading. There are a lot of gaps to fill in with your understanding of what isn't being said as well.

Something in the white spaces that the short pieces created on the page was quite compelling to me. It made me think of conversations we have with people who are trying to tell us something hard. There are gaps, sometimes long gaps, when describing the reality is too hard, when silences filled with meaning and pain are all we have. The white space between the pieces (some of them are just a couple sentences long) gave me that same sensation.

This isn't a book to read in a hurry, but one to honor with time and attention. It's more than a story. it's a journey into trying to understand meaning on a personal and level, but also in the way fairy tales can teach us how the world works, an attempt to understand how the world can work this way sometimes.]]> 4.41 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Christine
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/20
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: lgbtq, women, fairytale
review:
What an astounding read.

I heard wonderful things about this book as a deeply moving and disturbing story. It is. I heard about it as an example of second person writing that works. It is.

What I didn't expect was a text infused with fairy tales and folk tales in spirit and language.

In a series of short pieces (you can't call them stories), Machado tells the story of her relationship and how it broke her and how she eventually broke out. It is not easy reading. There are a lot of gaps to fill in with your understanding of what isn't being said as well.

Something in the white spaces that the short pieces created on the page was quite compelling to me. It made me think of conversations we have with people who are trying to tell us something hard. There are gaps, sometimes long gaps, when describing the reality is too hard, when silences filled with meaning and pain are all we have. The white space between the pieces (some of them are just a couple sentences long) gave me that same sensation.

This isn't a book to read in a hurry, but one to honor with time and attention. It's more than a story. it's a journey into trying to understand meaning on a personal and level, but also in the way fairy tales can teach us how the world works, an attempt to understand how the world can work this way sometimes.
]]> I Am Pilgrim 18144124 Pilgrim.']]> 612 Terry Hayes 1439177724 Christine 4 4.25 2013 I Am Pilgrim
author: Terry Hayes
name: Christine
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stolen Bicycle 36208444
Award-winning novelist Wu Ming-Yi is also an artist, designer, photographer, literary professor, butterfly scholar, environmental activist, traveller and blogger, and is widely considered the leading writer of his generation in his native Taiwan.]]> 308 Wu Ming-Yi 192541079X Christine 4 asian-lit, taiwan
If you like bicycles or Taiwan's history or are obsessed with diving into history, you'll enjoy this book.]]> 3.77 2015 The Stolen Bicycle
author: Wu Ming-Yi
name: Christine
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: asian-lit, taiwan
review:
What a lovely and unexpected story. On the one hand, there's the story of one young man trying to find the bicycle his grand father lost and the people he meets (and falls in love with) along the way. On the other hand, it's a detailed history of the bicycle in Taiwan's history, complete with remarkably detailed drawings of different styles of bicycles and descriptions of their design history.

If you like bicycles or Taiwan's history or are obsessed with diving into history, you'll enjoy this book.
]]> <![CDATA[Fragile Things: Short Fictions & Wonders]]> 594625 In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . .
In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered Victorian England, the great detective Sherlock Holmes must solve a most unsettling royal murder . . .
Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares . . .
In a Locus Award-winning tale, the members of an exclusive epicurean club lament that they've eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird . . .

Such marvelous creations and more—including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.]]> 448 Neil Gaiman 0755334159 Christine 5 short-stories 3.83 2006 Fragile Things: Short Fictions & Wonders
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Christine
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/30
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: short-stories
review:
Great writing, as I always expect from Gaiman. These stories were incredibly varied in subject, style, and challenge. The stories are always between worlds and ideas. The product of a prolific imagination and fine thinking. Gaiman makes writing look easy. It can't be.
]]> The Sleeper and the Spindle 23301545
On the eve of her wedding, a young queen sets out to rescue a princess from an enchantment. She casts aside her fine wedding clothes, takes her chain mail and her sword and follows her brave dwarf retainers into the tunnels under the mountain towards the sleeping kingdom. This queen will decide her own future � and the princess who needs rescuing is not quite what she seems. Twisting together the familiar and the new, this perfectly delicious, captivating and darkly funny tale shows its creators at the peak of their talents.

Lavishly produced, packed with glorious Chris Riddell illustrations enhanced with metallic ink, this is a spectacular and magical gift.]]> 68 Neil Gaiman 1408859645 Christine 5 3.87 2013 The Sleeper and the Spindle
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Christine
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/01
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: childrens, fairytale, storytelling
review:
Not Sleeping Beauty and not Snow White, but also not not those stories. These women are full of their own agency and uninterested in waiting for other people to rescue them. All the magic of a fairy tale and all the power we know women have plus gorgeous drawings. What's not to love?
]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Christine 0 to-read 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Christine
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Wonder 28449257
An educated sceptic, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax right away. But as she gets to know the girl she becomes more and more unsure. Is Anna a fraud, or a 'living wonder'? Or is something more sinister unfolding right before Lib's eyes?

Written with all the propulsive tension that transported readers of Room, The Wonder asks what lengths we would go to for the love of a child.]]> 291 Emma Donoghue 0316393878 Christine 0 to-read 3.60 2016 The Wonder
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Christine
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[So You Want to Talk About Race]]> 35099718 In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today's racial landscape--from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement--offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.

Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay "The Meaning of a Word."]]> 248 Ijeoma Oluo 1580056776 Christine 4 audiobook, library-book 4.48 2018 So You Want to Talk About Race
author: Ijeoma Oluo
name: Christine
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: audiobook, library-book
review:

]]> Tamara Drewe 1714035
People are drawn to Tamara Drewe, male and female. In the remote village where her late mother lived Tamara arrives to clear up the house. Here she becomes an object of lust, of envy, the focus of unrequited love, a seductress. To the village teenagers she is 'plastic-fantastic', a role model. Ultimately, when her hot and indiscriminate glances lead to tragedy, she is seen as a man-eater, a heartless marriage wrecker, a slut.

First appearing as a serial in the Guardian, in book form Tamara Drewe has been enlarged, embellished and lovingly improved by the author.

]]> 136 Posy Simmonds 022407816X Christine 4 library-book, graphic-novel 3.74 2007 Tamara Drewe
author: Posy Simmonds
name: Christine
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/01
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: library-book, graphic-novel
review:
Delightful read and lovely to look at as well. I'd love to read all of Posy Simmonds work now!
]]> Outline 55172725 A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language

A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.

Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.

Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people's motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.]]> 258 Rachel Cusk Christine 4 3.74 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Christine
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/29
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 56953435
Kim Jiyoung is a female preyed upon by male teachers at school. Kim Jiyoung is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night.

Kim Jiyoung is a good student who doesn't get put forward for internships. Kim Jiyoung is a model employee but gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Jiyoung is a wife who gives up her career and independence for a life of domesticity.

Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely.

Kim Jiyoung is depressed.

Kim Jiyoung is mad.

Kim Jiyoung is her own woman.

Kim Jiyoung is every woman.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the life story of one young woman born at the end of the twentieth century and raises questions about endemic misogyny and institutional oppression that are relevant to us all. Riveting, original and uncompromising, this is the most important book to have emerged from South Korea since Han Kang's The Vegetarian.]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo 1471184307 Christine 5 asian-lit, korean 4.22 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: Christine
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/22
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, korean
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division]]> 50485581
Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. We feel overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, by an endless feeling of crisis. So, how can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? And how can we stay sane in this age of division?

In this powerful, uplifting plea for conscious optimism, Booker Prize-nominated novelist and activist Elif Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to bring us together. In the process, she reveals how listening to each other can nurture democracy, empathy and our faith in a kinder and wiser future.]]> 96 Elif Shafak 1788165721 Christine 2 4.00 2020 How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
author: Elif Shafak
name: Christine
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/05/22
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Kindred 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Christine 0 black-authors 4.30 1979 Kindred
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Christine
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/08
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: black-authors
review:

]]> The Yield 53068123
August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land � a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.]]> 352 Tara June Winch 0063003465 Christine 5 2012
The Yield is the story of August Gondiwindi, who returns from ten years abroad to her Indiginous family’s farm in Australia for her grandfather’s funeral and finds herself in a property and identity crisis. The novel is written in three voices, August’s contemporary voice, her grandfather’s Wiradjuri dictionary entries, and a letter written by a missionary reverend who originally built the farm in 1915.

I was surprised to find the grandfather’s dictionary entries the most compelling voice of all three. Each entry is an exploration of what the word means to the man. Some are brief, just a few sentences, but some go on for a few paragraphs and include personal or folk stories. The dictionary entries are in reverse alphabetical order and yet are so carefully crafted that they fill in the gaps created by the other two narratives. This is the work of a master storyteller.

If you’re liking the sound of this and want to hear more about The Yield, I recommend the which is all about it. I also heartily recommend the book. It’s an outstanding read.]]> 4.05 2019 The Yield
author: Tara June Winch
name: Christine
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/19
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: 2012
review:
This was a book club read and a prime example of why it’s so valuable to have an international book club. An Australian member of the group gently insisted we read this book and we are all so happy we agreed.

The Yield is the story of August Gondiwindi, who returns from ten years abroad to her Indiginous family’s farm in Australia for her grandfather’s funeral and finds herself in a property and identity crisis. The novel is written in three voices, August’s contemporary voice, her grandfather’s Wiradjuri dictionary entries, and a letter written by a missionary reverend who originally built the farm in 1915.

I was surprised to find the grandfather’s dictionary entries the most compelling voice of all three. Each entry is an exploration of what the word means to the man. Some are brief, just a few sentences, but some go on for a few paragraphs and include personal or folk stories. The dictionary entries are in reverse alphabetical order and yet are so carefully crafted that they fill in the gaps created by the other two narratives. This is the work of a master storyteller.

If you’re liking the sound of this and want to hear more about The Yield, I recommend the which is all about it. I also heartily recommend the book. It’s an outstanding read.
]]> Free Food for Millionaires 40727626
Free Food For Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.]]> 577 Min Jin Lee Christine 0 asian-lit, 2012, korean 3.91 2007 Free Food for Millionaires
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Christine
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2021/04/14
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, 2012, korean
review:

]]> Pachinko 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee Christine 4 asian-lit, 2012, korean A Little Life with no idea of the epic journey I was embarking on!

My first experience with the game pachinko was seeing pachinko shops in Taiwan when we first visited in the 1980s. They were small, bright, noisy places. The shops themselves were narrow, maybe 10 feet wide with machines lining the outside walls and a row of machines back to back in the middle as well. At each machine, someone sat with a plastic basket catching metal balls that tumbled out of the machine. The sound was of metal on metal and electronic dings. It was like being at the fairground.

Pachinko the novel isn’t much about the game, though, and I have to admit I was disappointed. There was a passing reference to one character adjusting the pins on the machine, but no explanation of the game, which I hoped for. Instead, The story is about Korean families who moved to Japan just before World War II and what it means to live life as immigrants in Japan. It’s not a spoiler to say things aren’t easy.

What Lee does well in this novel is take us deep into characters inner lives as they grow and face new adversities and few joys and as their life paths cross and re-cross through time. It was a very nice read that gave me insight into a time and place I hadn’t given much thought to before.

See more book reviews on my blog: ]]> 4.35 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Christine
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, 2012, korean
review:
This book has been on my list for a long time, but I’ve been very intimidated by how long it is. Silly, right? I ended up checking it out from my local library on Kindle and not once did it feel like a “long� book. Kindle’s are actually great for helping readers ignore how long a book is before they pick it up. It’s how I got through A Little Life with no idea of the epic journey I was embarking on!

My first experience with the game pachinko was seeing pachinko shops in Taiwan when we first visited in the 1980s. They were small, bright, noisy places. The shops themselves were narrow, maybe 10 feet wide with machines lining the outside walls and a row of machines back to back in the middle as well. At each machine, someone sat with a plastic basket catching metal balls that tumbled out of the machine. The sound was of metal on metal and electronic dings. It was like being at the fairground.

Pachinko the novel isn’t much about the game, though, and I have to admit I was disappointed. There was a passing reference to one character adjusting the pins on the machine, but no explanation of the game, which I hoped for. Instead, The story is about Korean families who moved to Japan just before World War II and what it means to live life as immigrants in Japan. It’s not a spoiler to say things aren’t easy.

What Lee does well in this novel is take us deep into characters inner lives as they grow and face new adversities and few joys and as their life paths cross and re-cross through time. It was a very nice read that gave me insight into a time and place I hadn’t given much thought to before.

See more book reviews on my blog:
]]> An American Marriage 33590210
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.]]> 308 Tayari Jones 1616201347 Christine 5 black-authors
An American Marriage tells the exceedingly sad story of a young Black couple whose marriage is pulled apart by a false accusation, guilty verdict, and prison. The story is told in chapters that alternate Roy’s and Celestial’s voices. Once Roy’s in jail, they exchange letters.

I’m having a hard time coming up with words for this because it was such a visceral reading experience. I ached for these characters and the unfairness of their situation. Everything about what they went through was wrong and yet they had no choice but to go through it. And through it all, they both try with everything they have to retain their dignity and their humanity.

This is a beautifully written novel that is hard to read because this kind of thing happens. Maybe not these personalities with these stories, but this kind of injustice ripping lives apart shredding dreams and impacting whole ecosystems of families and friends and communities. Read this book because it’s wonderfully written and because we must all work to make sure these stories become artifacts instead of facts.]]> 3.91 2018 An American Marriage
author: Tayari Jones
name: Christine
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/23
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: black-authors
review:
In the way that books seem to relate to each other, this book surprised me with a section that was written as a letter exchange. I’ve seen it on a lot of Black author lists but it took me a while to feel emotionally ready to read it.

An American Marriage tells the exceedingly sad story of a young Black couple whose marriage is pulled apart by a false accusation, guilty verdict, and prison. The story is told in chapters that alternate Roy’s and Celestial’s voices. Once Roy’s in jail, they exchange letters.

I’m having a hard time coming up with words for this because it was such a visceral reading experience. I ached for these characters and the unfairness of their situation. Everything about what they went through was wrong and yet they had no choice but to go through it. And through it all, they both try with everything they have to retain their dignity and their humanity.

This is a beautifully written novel that is hard to read because this kind of thing happens. Maybe not these personalities with these stories, but this kind of injustice ripping lives apart shredding dreams and impacting whole ecosystems of families and friends and communities. Read this book because it’s wonderfully written and because we must all work to make sure these stories become artifacts instead of facts.
]]> Real Life 46263943
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.]]> 329 Brandon Taylor 0525538887 Christine 4 black-authors
Real Life tells the story of one weekend in the life of Wallace, a gay Black life sciences PhD student at a midwestern University in the United States. Brandon Taylor manages to fill this weekend with every conflict, doubt, and pain that Wallace has been carrying. These are conveyed in conversations that Wallace both participates in and observes and descriptions of details that become deeply symbolic without falling into pretension.

In some ways, the story reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, another book about an outsider trying to navigate his entree into an academic social circle that includes his body without ever understanding or caring about his person in a meaningful way. The main difference is that the violences here are not physical but psychological and deeply harmful in part because they leave pain and doubt behind.

This book touches on race, sexuality, honesty, academic integrity, favoritism, friendship, love, desire, and more and does it by slowing everything down. It makes me wonder if all of our lives contain so much in so little time and if we miss it purely because we aren’t paying attention. If you liked The Secret History, you’ll like Real Life as well!]]> 3.79 2020 Real Life
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Christine
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/31
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: black-authors
review:
A friend of mine kept talking about this book and kept talking about this book and loaned me the book and finally, I read it. I actually read this after an Alex Rider book, which is all action and fast pace. This book is the opposite, incredibly contemplative and deliberate and deep.

Real Life tells the story of one weekend in the life of Wallace, a gay Black life sciences PhD student at a midwestern University in the United States. Brandon Taylor manages to fill this weekend with every conflict, doubt, and pain that Wallace has been carrying. These are conveyed in conversations that Wallace both participates in and observes and descriptions of details that become deeply symbolic without falling into pretension.

In some ways, the story reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, another book about an outsider trying to navigate his entree into an academic social circle that includes his body without ever understanding or caring about his person in a meaningful way. The main difference is that the violences here are not physical but psychological and deeply harmful in part because they leave pain and doubt behind.

This book touches on race, sexuality, honesty, academic integrity, favoritism, friendship, love, desire, and more and does it by slowing everything down. It makes me wonder if all of our lives contain so much in so little time and if we miss it purely because we aren’t paying attention. If you liked The Secret History, you’ll like Real Life as well!
]]> Earthlings 50269327
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki's family are increasing, her friends wonder why she's still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki's childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?]]> 247 Sayaka Murata 1783785675 Christine 0 book-club, japan 3.59 2018 Earthlings
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Christine
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2021/04/10
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: book-club, japan
review:

]]> The Mountains Sing 51978471 “An epic account of Việt Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.� —VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the H� Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore not just her beloved country, but her family apart.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.

The Mountains Sing is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Phan Qu� Mai’s first novel in English.]]> 352 Nguyễn Phan Qu� Mai Christine 0 asian-lit, 2012 4.35 2020 The Mountains Sing
author: Nguyễn Phan Qu� Mai
name: Christine
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2021/05/12
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, 2012
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Dancing Girl and the Turtle]]> 34237582
Song Anyi is on the road to Shanghai and freedom when she is raped and left for dead. The silence and shame

that mark her courageous survival drive her to escalating self-harm and prostitution. From opium dens to high- class brothels, Anyi dances on the edge of destruction while China prepares for war with Japan. Hers is the voice of every woman who fights for independence against overwhelming odds.

The Dancing Girl and the Turtle is one of four interlocking novels set in Shanghai from 1929 to 1954. Through the eyes of the dancer, Song Anyi, and her brother Kang, the Shanghai Quartet spans a tumultuous time in Chinese war with the Japanese, the influx of stateless Jews into Shanghai, civil war and revolution. How does the love of a sister destroy her brother and all those around him?]]> 254 Karen Kao 0993599710 Christine 0 asian-lit, china 3.76 2017 The Dancing Girl and the Turtle
author: Karen Kao
name: Christine
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2021/05/12
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, china
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Much of These Hills Is Gold]]> 45895362
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.]]> 288 C Pam Zhang 0525537201 Christine 0 2020, asian-lit
Set in the Gold Rush, this is a story of two sisters� journey. It begins the day after their father dies. The story moves back and forth in time, revealing what their lives were like before their parents died and following their travels closely.

The pace of this book reminded me of books like Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun or Plainsong and Eventide by Kent Haruf. More recently, Burial RitesBurial Rites by Hannah Kent as well. These novels are both slow-moving and constantly in motion. It’s like literary tai-chi. All of these books felt simultaneously slow because so little seemed to happen and yet they drew me in because every detail was important. They are deliberate. They may be in a place where literature comes close to poetry in the sense that the details of the landscape play an important role in understanding the novel.

I don’t like it when reviewers describe the landscape as playing a role in a novel, that’s not it. It’s just that you can’t move these books to a different setting and have the same story. The characters would have moved through it differently. Have a look at How Much of these Hills is Gold and see if you agree with me! ]]> 3.77 2020 How Much of These Hills Is Gold
author: C Pam Zhang
name: Christine
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2020/11/21
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: 2020, asian-lit
review:
This book first came to my attention when it turned up on the Booker Prize long list. My shock at seeing a Chinese author on the list also made me realize that while I could write lists of Black or Indian authors with ease, I don’t actually read many Chinese authors. That’s going to change in 2021. If you’ve got recommendations, please share them!

Set in the Gold Rush, this is a story of two sisters� journey. It begins the day after their father dies. The story moves back and forth in time, revealing what their lives were like before their parents died and following their travels closely.

The pace of this book reminded me of books like Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun or Plainsong and Eventide by Kent Haruf. More recently, Burial RitesBurial Rites by Hannah Kent as well. These novels are both slow-moving and constantly in motion. It’s like literary tai-chi. All of these books felt simultaneously slow because so little seemed to happen and yet they drew me in because every detail was important. They are deliberate. They may be in a place where literature comes close to poetry in the sense that the details of the landscape play an important role in understanding the novel.

I don’t like it when reviewers describe the landscape as playing a role in a novel, that’s not it. It’s just that you can’t move these books to a different setting and have the same story. The characters would have moved through it differently. Have a look at How Much of these Hills is Gold and see if you agree with me!
]]> Convenience Store Woman 38357895
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata Christine 5 japan Earthlings for my book club in 2021 and I wanted to get a taste of Murata’s work.

From the moment I opened the cover until I finished it about 24 hours later, this book grabbed me and would not let go. It’s a delight to read but also feels a little like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The main character made choice after choice that left me cringing and yet I had to pay attention to see what happened next.

Murata’s ability to dig into a character who you may not want to spend 5 minutes with in real life reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or short story characters created by Miranda July. All three women seem to take the most irritating quality in a character, amplify it and then watch to see what happens. Murata stands out for me by having a main character who I could genuinely sympathize with. There’s also a wink in her writing. She sees her main character for who she is and still wants you to follow along.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and cannot wait to read Earthlings!]]> 3.70 2016 Convenience Store Woman
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Christine
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/22
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: japan
review:
I picked this book up at the library because it was thin, written by an Asian woman, and we are planning to read Earthlings for my book club in 2021 and I wanted to get a taste of Murata’s work.

From the moment I opened the cover until I finished it about 24 hours later, this book grabbed me and would not let go. It’s a delight to read but also feels a little like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The main character made choice after choice that left me cringing and yet I had to pay attention to see what happened next.

Murata’s ability to dig into a character who you may not want to spend 5 minutes with in real life reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or short story characters created by Miranda July. All three women seem to take the most irritating quality in a character, amplify it and then watch to see what happens. Murata stands out for me by having a main character who I could genuinely sympathize with. There’s also a wink in her writing. She sees her main character for who she is and still wants you to follow along.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and cannot wait to read Earthlings!
]]> Interior Chinatown 53479022 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration�Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 266 Charles Yu 0307948471 Christine 5 2020, taiwan, asian-lit
The first thing you’ll notice is that this novel is written as a script. The second thing you’ll notice is that the font is a typewriter-style serif font. This book looks different than most books. That makes sense because the premise is utterly unique as well. This is the story of Generic Asian Man. He’s a character in every story and no story and his life is every life and no life.

This is a book you commit to. It isn’t hard because the premise is so original that you’ll be reading and re-reading it before you hit page ten. But somewhere along the line, it needed to be more than a creative concept. All of that is taken care of in Act VII. The last chapter of this book is a combination of history lesson and identity theory that had me nodding, making that agreement noise in my throat, and telling my family to leave me alone.

Yu’s book may look cute and baffle a bit, but that makes sense. His earlier books were science fiction. At its heart, this book is asking urgent questions about Asian identity that need more consideration. It’s a great read as well.]]> 4.03 2020 Interior Chinatown
author: Charles Yu
name: Christine
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/30
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: 2020, taiwan, asian-lit
review:
Here’s what I like about being an adult. When I read that Taiwanese-American Charles Yu won the National Book Award, I ordered the book before I finished the article. After all, if you commit to reading more Asian authors, you have to follow through!

The first thing you’ll notice is that this novel is written as a script. The second thing you’ll notice is that the font is a typewriter-style serif font. This book looks different than most books. That makes sense because the premise is utterly unique as well. This is the story of Generic Asian Man. He’s a character in every story and no story and his life is every life and no life.

This is a book you commit to. It isn’t hard because the premise is so original that you’ll be reading and re-reading it before you hit page ten. But somewhere along the line, it needed to be more than a creative concept. All of that is taken care of in Act VII. The last chapter of this book is a combination of history lesson and identity theory that had me nodding, making that agreement noise in my throat, and telling my family to leave me alone.

Yu’s book may look cute and baffle a bit, but that makes sense. His earlier books were science fiction. At its heart, this book is asking urgent questions about Asian identity that need more consideration. It’s a great read as well.
]]> Braised Pork 45161754
Profoundly troubled by what she has seen, even while she is abruptly released from a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia embarks on a journey to discover the truth of the sketch. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, with its brandy and vinyl, and fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, Jia Jia travels deep into her past in order to arrive at her future.

Braised Pork is a cinematic, often dreamlike evocation of nocturnal Beijing and the high plains of Tibet, and an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself.]]> 240 An Yu 1787301877 Christine 0 2020, asian-lit 3.43 2020 Braised Pork
author: An Yu
name: Christine
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2020/12/29
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: 2020, asian-lit
review:

]]> Pachinko 53331127 "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones."

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee Christine 0 asian-lit 4.43 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Christine
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2021/02/17
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past]]> 45755339 Combining an immersive exploration of nature with captivatingly beautiful prose, Jessica J. Lee embarks on a journey to discover her family's forgotten history and to connect with the island they once called home

Taiwan is an island of extremes: towering mountains, lush forests, and barren escarpment. Between shifting tectonic plates and a history rife with tension, the geographical and political landscape is forever evolving. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather's life, Jessica J. Lee seeks to piece together the fragments of her family's history as they moved from China to Taiwan, and then on to Canada. But as she navigates the tumultuous terrain of Taiwan, Lee finds herself having to traverse fissures in language, memory, and history, as she searches for the pieces of her family left behind.

Interlacing a personal narrative with Taiwan's history and terrain, Two Trees Make a Forest is an intimate examination of the human relationship with geography and nature, and offers an exploration of one woman's search for history and belonging amidst an ever-shifting landscape.]]> 304 Jessica J. Lee 0735239576 Christine 5 asian-lit, taiwan
Two Trees Make a Forest is a combination of memoir and nature writing that’s driven by Lee’s curiosity about her grandfather, the island where he comes from, and a piece of memoir writing the family finds in his belongings. Her view of Taiwan was entirely new to me, one that was about hiking and views and fault lines and earthquakes. She talks about the gaps and dilemmas of language as well as the way we take our elders for granted and fail to connect with them as people, particularly if they are immigrants.

I snapped this book up with the same energy that I got my hands on Interior Chinatown. I want badly to read more authors with Taiwanese roots, those who grew up with the island in the distance. Never close enough to call it home, but tied to it irrevocably and influenced by everything it represents. Lee’s focus on the beauty of the island instead of the bustle of the cities was a revelation for me. This book isn’t for everyone, but if you’re curious about Taiwan and want to see a side of it that’s little discussed outside of guidebooks, have a read. You’ll appreciate it immensely.]]> 3.39 2020 Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past
author: Jessica J. Lee
name: Christine
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/10
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, taiwan
review:
The internet showed me a reference to this book and I bought it right away. Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Tawanese writer and her hyphens are so familiar to me as I go through life American-Dutch-Taiwanese. I was intensely curious about this book.

Two Trees Make a Forest is a combination of memoir and nature writing that’s driven by Lee’s curiosity about her grandfather, the island where he comes from, and a piece of memoir writing the family finds in his belongings. Her view of Taiwan was entirely new to me, one that was about hiking and views and fault lines and earthquakes. She talks about the gaps and dilemmas of language as well as the way we take our elders for granted and fail to connect with them as people, particularly if they are immigrants.

I snapped this book up with the same energy that I got my hands on Interior Chinatown. I want badly to read more authors with Taiwanese roots, those who grew up with the island in the distance. Never close enough to call it home, but tied to it irrevocably and influenced by everything it represents. Lee’s focus on the beauty of the island instead of the bustle of the cities was a revelation for me. This book isn’t for everyone, but if you’re curious about Taiwan and want to see a side of it that’s little discussed outside of guidebooks, have a read. You’ll appreciate it immensely.
]]> <![CDATA[Ghost Month (Taipei Night Market #1)]]> 18761187
Jing-nan, a young man who runs a food stand in a bustling Taipei night market, doesn't consider himself superstitious, but this August is going to haunt him no matter what he does. He is shocked to the core when he learns his ex-girlfriend from high school has been murdered. She was found scantily clad and shot in the chest on the side of a highway where she was selling betel nuts to passing truck drivers.

Beyond his harrowing grief for this lost love of his life, Jing-nan is also confused by the news: "betel nut beauties" are usually women in the most desperate of circumstances; the job is almost as taboo as prostitution. But Julia Huang had been the valedictorian of their high school, and the last time Jing-nan spoke to her she was enrolled in NYU's honor program, far away in New York. The facts don't add up. Julia's parents don't think so, either, and the police seem to have closed the case without asking any questions.

The Huangs beg Jing-nan if he can do some investigating on his own-reconnect with old classmates, see if he can learn anything about Julia's life that she might have kept from them. Reluctantly, he agrees, for Julia's sake; but nothing can prepare him for what he learns, or how it will change his life.]]> 336 Ed Lin 1616953268 Christine 4 taiwan, mystery, asian-lit Green Island and Notes of a Crocodile, it was a treat to read something very contemporary. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Lin's writing evoked the Taipei I've seen and the city that lives in my memory. It's what I enjoyed most about this book.]]> 3.26 2014 Ghost Month (Taipei Night Market #1)
author: Ed Lin
name: Christine
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/05
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: taiwan, mystery, asian-lit
review:
I read this book for the setting, 100%. Well, that's why I started. Then I got sucked into the plot and had a grand old time. After reading a lot of fiction about Taiwan that's set in the past like Green Island and Notes of a Crocodile, it was a treat to read something very contemporary. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Lin's writing evoked the Taipei I've seen and the city that lives in my memory. It's what I enjoyed most about this book.
]]> Hunter School 51317552
It is impossible to be unaware of the effect of development, invariably at the hands of outsiders, upon the lands, inhabitants and very nature of faraway climes. Hunter School shows us first-hand the immediate and long-reaching effects of such changes upon an indigenous people. The fabric of the community is changed, its balance and its self-sufficiency undermined, and confusion reigns. A common theme running throughout this charming but important book is that of a young man learning about himself and his heritage from the past, elders, ancestors, and nature itself.

This award-winning book is a highly readable and touching work, and an insight into a unique and endangered society. It serves also as a clarion call for action and awareness.]]> 162 Sakinu Ahronglong 1999791282 Christine 4 asian-lit, taiwan
We think the most important conversations about Taiwan revolve around the one nation question and whether or Taiwan is part of China. But Taiwan is home to numerous aboriginal groups who were there first. The Paiwanese lived in the hills and hunted for their livelihood and survival. The government moved them away from their ancestral homes (does this sound familiar) and sent the children to schools where they learned Mandarin Chinese instead of their own language (ring a bell?).

What makes these stories interesting is the author's transformation from a boy who dreads following his father into the woods for another long day of traditional hunting and walking to a young man who fights his father for a traditional marriage instead of a Christian one. Activists are not born, they are made. Their feelings about the place and traditions they come from change.

By the time Sakinu decides he wants a traditional wedding, there are few elders living in the village who have any recollection of what traditional weddings were like. That's how close his culture is to dying out when he steps in.

This collection is a lovely set of stories about a place few people think about it from a perspective that rarely gets a voice. It's also the story of the making of an activist. It's a reminder that the stories we tell matter and that even if our children or our audiences don't seem to listen or appreciate, we have to keep telling the stories. Their impact often comes later.]]> 3.60 Hunter School
author: Sakinu Ahronglong
name: Christine
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: asian-lit, taiwan
review:
A beautiful and unexpected collection of personal essays about a young Paiwan man who makes saving his culture a life lesson.

We think the most important conversations about Taiwan revolve around the one nation question and whether or Taiwan is part of China. But Taiwan is home to numerous aboriginal groups who were there first. The Paiwanese lived in the hills and hunted for their livelihood and survival. The government moved them away from their ancestral homes (does this sound familiar) and sent the children to schools where they learned Mandarin Chinese instead of their own language (ring a bell?).

What makes these stories interesting is the author's transformation from a boy who dreads following his father into the woods for another long day of traditional hunting and walking to a young man who fights his father for a traditional marriage instead of a Christian one. Activists are not born, they are made. Their feelings about the place and traditions they come from change.

By the time Sakinu decides he wants a traditional wedding, there are few elders living in the village who have any recollection of what traditional weddings were like. That's how close his culture is to dying out when he steps in.

This collection is a lovely set of stories about a place few people think about it from a perspective that rarely gets a voice. It's also the story of the making of an activist. It's a reminder that the stories we tell matter and that even if our children or our audiences don't seem to listen or appreciate, we have to keep telling the stories. Their impact often comes later.
]]> Matrix 57185348 Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie's vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
]]> 260 Lauren Groff 1594634491 Christine 5 library-book
I was particularly taken by the way Groff marked the passing of time in the first third of the book. We make it through nearly 50 years of a remarkable woman's life, Marie, and Groff pulls our attention to the most important moments without losing momentum. Yet, she manages to include the most telling details along the way, like the growth of a particularly meaningful tree. All this, she does without falling into being a pastoral novel.

There's very little dialogue in this novel, yet the characters are deeply and convincingly developed. You get a sense for how intimately these women who lived in the closest of quarters knew each other from not what they say to each other but through the silences that say enough.

There is a lot of building that happens in the story, which is remarkable given that it happens in the 1100s. Our attention is drawn to the traces of departed Roman builders and we experience Marie's appreciation for the many hundreds of years that have passed since they were there. When Groff describes Marie's building, she includes striking details about a red salamander that was the last of its kinds and trees that had seen the Normans ending up underwater. In Marie's building there is also destruction.

There's a message here that everything has changed in the last 900 years and nothing has changed. There is still ambition and longing and destruction and joy and contentment after pain. Groff is a remarkable author and I can't wait to see what she writes next!]]> 3.64 2021 Matrix
author: Lauren Groff
name: Christine
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/05
date added: 2022/02/09
shelves: library-book
review:
An astounding read from page one.

I was particularly taken by the way Groff marked the passing of time in the first third of the book. We make it through nearly 50 years of a remarkable woman's life, Marie, and Groff pulls our attention to the most important moments without losing momentum. Yet, she manages to include the most telling details along the way, like the growth of a particularly meaningful tree. All this, she does without falling into being a pastoral novel.

There's very little dialogue in this novel, yet the characters are deeply and convincingly developed. You get a sense for how intimately these women who lived in the closest of quarters knew each other from not what they say to each other but through the silences that say enough.

There is a lot of building that happens in the story, which is remarkable given that it happens in the 1100s. Our attention is drawn to the traces of departed Roman builders and we experience Marie's appreciation for the many hundreds of years that have passed since they were there. When Groff describes Marie's building, she includes striking details about a red salamander that was the last of its kinds and trees that had seen the Normans ending up underwater. In Marie's building there is also destruction.

There's a message here that everything has changed in the last 900 years and nothing has changed. There is still ambition and longing and destruction and joy and contentment after pain. Groff is a remarkable author and I can't wait to see what she writes next!
]]> Little Fires Everywhere 34331079
Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, ŷ, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste, Kirkus Reviews, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and many more...

Perfect for book clubs! Visit celesteng.com for discussion guides and more. ]]> 348 Celeste Ng Christine 0 to-read 4.23 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
author: Celeste Ng
name: Christine
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mr. Gwyn 18668177
Three Times at Dawn explores this question while leaving greater mysteries in its wake. A man and a woman � the same couple in each case � meet in a trio of hotels; first she is a seductress, he a traveling salesman; on another night she is young and pregnant, while he is old and haunted by his past; finally, she is middle-aged, and he is a child whose life is already marked by tragedy. As their third dawn together draws to a close, Baricco delivers one of modern fiction’s most powerful statements on the heart and the will, on kindness and the destiny that falls light as a shadow over every human life.]]> 150 Alessandro Baricco 1938073967 Christine 0 to-read 4.03 2011 Mr. Gwyn
author: Alessandro Baricco
name: Christine
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Kiss Before You Go: An Illustrated Memoir of Love and Loss]]> 15788878 128 Danny Gregory 1452101949 Christine 4 graphic-novel, library-book The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are that's well thumbed by myself and my children. I ran into this memoir at the public library and bless libraries, I didn't even know I needed it.

His story of loss has echoes of The Year of Magical Thinking in the way he reflects on losing his partner and the myriad ways that loss comes back and reinvents itself as he journeys through grief. What sticks with me is also the fierce love he has for his son and how this leads both to wanting to take care of him and being in awe of him.

This is a raw hard story about grief and getting on with life. It's beautifully illustrated in Gregory's signature sketch book style. Absolutely worth a read.]]> 4.34 2012 A Kiss Before You Go: An Illustrated Memoir of Love and Loss
author: Danny Gregory
name: Christine
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/10
date added: 2021/10/14
shelves: graphic-novel, library-book
review:
I own a copy of The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are that's well thumbed by myself and my children. I ran into this memoir at the public library and bless libraries, I didn't even know I needed it.

His story of loss has echoes of The Year of Magical Thinking in the way he reflects on losing his partner and the myriad ways that loss comes back and reinvents itself as he journeys through grief. What sticks with me is also the fierce love he has for his son and how this leads both to wanting to take care of him and being in awe of him.

This is a raw hard story about grief and getting on with life. It's beautifully illustrated in Gregory's signature sketch book style. Absolutely worth a read.
]]> <![CDATA[Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World]]> 40090596
"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before". (Neil Gaiman)

Drawn from Gaiman's trove of published speeches, poems and creative manifestos, 'ART MATTERS' is an embodiment of this remarkable multimedia artist's vision - an exploration of how reading, imagining, and creating can transform the world and our lives.

'ART MATTERS' brings together four of Gaiman's most beloved writings on creativity and artistry:

�1�
"CREDO", his remarkably concise and relevant manifesto on free expression, first delivered in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings

�2�
"MAKE GOOD ART", his famous 2012 commencement address delivered at the Philadelphia University of the Arts

�3�
"MAKING A CHAIR", a poem about the joys of creating something, even when the words won't come

�4�
"ON LIBRARIES", an impassioned argument for libraries that illuminates their importance to our future and celebrates how they foster readers and daydreamers.

'ART MATTERS' is a stirring testament to the freedom of ideas that inspire us to make art in the face of adversity and dares us to choose to be bold.




RUNNING TIME � 49mins.

©2018 Neil Gaiman (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers]]> 95 Neil Gaiman 1472260090 Christine 5
I felt like it started slowly but then caught fire. It left me needing to have the book, so I've ordered a copy to reread. Perhaps then the concepts will sink in. When I look back now just a week and a day later, I just remember the feeling of WOW. Can't wait to read it again.]]> 4.27 2018 Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Christine
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/06
date added: 2021/10/14
shelves: non-fiction, creativity, library-book
review:
Found this book the old fashioned way, browsing the library shelves to see what they might offer up and this little volume caught my attention. It's a collection of four illustrated essays that I read in an evening.

I felt like it started slowly but then caught fire. It left me needing to have the book, so I've ordered a copy to reread. Perhaps then the concepts will sink in. When I look back now just a week and a day later, I just remember the feeling of WOW. Can't wait to read it again.
]]> The Vanishing Half 51791252
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.]]> 343 Brit Bennett 0525536299 Christine 3 black-authors
But it was also familiar from reading Homegoing. In Homegoing, one twin becomes a slave and the other does not. We then follow several generations of the family to see what the consequences are. This book does similar with a bit of parent trap thrown in when one of the daughters accidentally sees her mothers' lost twin.

The question of what drives these women and why they change or do not is more interesting than what happens next in their lives. I was struck by how each of the four women in the story chooses to lead a life around a gap. Stella never tells her husband about herself. Desiree ultimately has a relationship with a man who she won't marry. Kennedy's super power is knowing when to end a relationship and Jude falls in love with a transsexual man and they keep his secret.

Why are these women driven to conceal part of themselves? Do they share a pain? What are they trying to protect by dancing around an emptiness? These kinds of questions felt unanswered as the book returned over and over to the issues of color. Instead of a driving force in the book, the color questions felt more like an initiating moment, a choice that sets off a cascade of events. But I missed the transformation, the character or characters who we got to know deeply and watched change.

It has made me quite curious to read Passing, though.]]> 4.11 2020 The Vanishing Half
author: Brit Bennett
name: Christine
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/03
date added: 2021/09/23
shelves: black-authors
review:
I wanted to like this book a lot, but in the end I was frustrated. The concept is intriguing - what happens when twin sisters choose different paths in life.

But it was also familiar from reading Homegoing. In Homegoing, one twin becomes a slave and the other does not. We then follow several generations of the family to see what the consequences are. This book does similar with a bit of parent trap thrown in when one of the daughters accidentally sees her mothers' lost twin.

The question of what drives these women and why they change or do not is more interesting than what happens next in their lives. I was struck by how each of the four women in the story chooses to lead a life around a gap. Stella never tells her husband about herself. Desiree ultimately has a relationship with a man who she won't marry. Kennedy's super power is knowing when to end a relationship and Jude falls in love with a transsexual man and they keep his secret.

Why are these women driven to conceal part of themselves? Do they share a pain? What are they trying to protect by dancing around an emptiness? These kinds of questions felt unanswered as the book returned over and over to the issues of color. Instead of a driving force in the book, the color questions felt more like an initiating moment, a choice that sets off a cascade of events. But I missed the transformation, the character or characters who we got to know deeply and watched change.

It has made me quite curious to read Passing, though.
]]> <![CDATA[The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #2)]]> 39913740
These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer. Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine � a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise.

Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed?

Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business.

But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realises that these secrets must be exposed � even at the risk of death�

]]> 373 Anthony Horowitz Christine 5 mystery
The Sentence is Death is no exception. Inspired by the Watson-Holmes relationship, Horowitz is a reluctant recorder of Hawthorne's stomp-on-the-flowers style mystery solving. The mystery is good, but what I love so much is how gloriously meta the entire story is. The main character has the same name as the author but is not the author and is addressing the reader who he cannot know about the process. The idea is that he writes each chapter to record events to he can solve the mystery himself.

The effect is immediate and intimate. He even writes about an alternate opening that he didn't use.

If you think of yourself as someone who loves literary fiction and would like to read a good mystery novel - this will make you happy. It's complex with a unique voice and wonderfully character driven.]]> 3.95 2018 The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #2)
author: Anthony Horowitz
name: Christine
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/26
date added: 2021/09/22
shelves: mystery
review:
I think I discovered Anthony Horowitz in 2021 and have read almost a dozen of his novels (adult mysteries and Alex Rider novels with my son) since. He is a remarkably consistent, smart, and readable author. His books are never what they first seem and often incredibly literary when it comes to playing games with perspective and author voices and speaking to the reader.

The Sentence is Death is no exception. Inspired by the Watson-Holmes relationship, Horowitz is a reluctant recorder of Hawthorne's stomp-on-the-flowers style mystery solving. The mystery is good, but what I love so much is how gloriously meta the entire story is. The main character has the same name as the author but is not the author and is addressing the reader who he cannot know about the process. The idea is that he writes each chapter to record events to he can solve the mystery himself.

The effect is immediate and intimate. He even writes about an alternate opening that he didn't use.

If you think of yourself as someone who loves literary fiction and would like to read a good mystery novel - this will make you happy. It's complex with a unique voice and wonderfully character driven.
]]> <![CDATA[The Confessions of Frannie Langton]]> 39937621 Alias Grace, The Underground Railroad, and The Paying Guests.

All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being held in the Old Bailey.

The testimonies against Frannie are damning. She is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, a whore.

But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even if remembering could save her life. She doesn’t know how she came to be covered in the victims� blood. But she does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who stretched all bounds of ethics, and the events that brought her into the Benhams� London home—and into a passionate and forbidden relationship.

Though her testimony may seal her conviction, the truth will unmask the perpetrators of crimes far beyond murder and indict the whole of English society itself.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is a breathtaking debut: a murder mystery that travels across the Atlantic and through the darkest channels of history. A brilliant, searing depiction of race, class, and oppression that penetrates the skin and sears the soul, it is the story of a woman of her own making in a world that would see her unmade.]]> 384 Sara Collins 0062851810 Christine 3
The story exposes ugly ideas about experimenting with people's lives in the interest of pseudo-science and these are worth considering and reflecting on.

In the end, the narrative didn't grab me the way I hoped it would. Frannie is an unfortunate soul and a character who holds on to an impossible optimism in the face of cruel realities. Perhaps her need for attention, approval, love are true to character, but in the end they are her undoing and I wished she could realize she was being used, not just for her labor but also for her heart.]]> 3.54 2019 The Confessions of Frannie Langton
author: Sara Collins
name: Christine
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/19
date added: 2021/09/22
shelves: black-authors, historical-fiction, library-book
review:
I've wanted to read this for a long time without knowing much about it. I like the format of a confessional letter and the premise, a black woman writing her side of the story after being convicted of killing her employer and his wife.

The story exposes ugly ideas about experimenting with people's lives in the interest of pseudo-science and these are worth considering and reflecting on.

In the end, the narrative didn't grab me the way I hoped it would. Frannie is an unfortunate soul and a character who holds on to an impossible optimism in the face of cruel realities. Perhaps her need for attention, approval, love are true to character, but in the end they are her undoing and I wished she could realize she was being used, not just for her labor but also for her heart.
]]> Music for Wartime 23398883 Named a must-read by the Chicago Tribune , O Magazine, BuzzFeed , The Huffington Post , Minneapolis Star-Tribune ,andThe L Magazine

Named one of the best short story collections of 2015 by Bookpage and Kansas City Star

Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.

A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction.

These transporting, deeply moving stories—some inspired by her own family history—amply demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form.]]> 240 Rebecca Makkai 0525426698 Christine 0 to-read 4.05 2015 Music for Wartime
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Christine
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Modern Times 54802914
“Cathy Sweeney’s stories have already attracted a band of fanatical devotees, and this first collection is as marvellous as we could have hoped for. A unique imagination, a brilliant debut.�
—Kevin Barry

“I loved this collection. It vibrates with a glorious strangeness! Magnificently weird, hugely entertaining, deeply profound.�
—Danielle McLaughlin

“In Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney gives us fables of the present that are funny, vertiginous and melancholy.�
—David Hayden]]> 160 Cathy Sweeney 1474618480 Christine 5 short-stories, library-book
I was at the library picking out thing books to accommodate my tiny attention span and happened upon this short story collection.

The first story is two pages long, starts with a line about how a woman loved her husband's penis so much that she took it to work in her lunch box. It ends with him thinking fondly of his ex.

The rest of the collection was equally off-beat and imaginative and well-written. She uses wonderfully quirky premises as starting points and deftly develops characters in just a few sentences. It was a lovely surprising read.

Any writer who can deliver something I'll never forget in two pages deserves 5 stars and your attention.]]> 3.06 2020 Modern Times
author: Cathy Sweeney
name: Christine
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves: short-stories, library-book
review:
**warning: words that describe male anatomy**

I was at the library picking out thing books to accommodate my tiny attention span and happened upon this short story collection.

The first story is two pages long, starts with a line about how a woman loved her husband's penis so much that she took it to work in her lunch box. It ends with him thinking fondly of his ex.

The rest of the collection was equally off-beat and imaginative and well-written. She uses wonderfully quirky premises as starting points and deftly develops characters in just a few sentences. It was a lovely surprising read.

Any writer who can deliver something I'll never forget in two pages deserves 5 stars and your attention.
]]> 365 dagen Nederlander 58313032 376 Naeeda Aurangzeb 9083142124 Christine 5 Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine struck me; a reading experience that takes you deep into the experience of living in another person's skin.

You can read it in a day or even a couple hours. Each page is brief. Each interaction is brief. Sometimes it starts to feel repetitive. Sometimes you wonder if the topics will change.

As you read, remind yourself that there are people who are facing this every single day. They cannot put the book down. They cannot walk away. They cannot decide it's not for them.

This book belongs on bookshelves, but also in waiting rooms and classrooms throughout the Netherlands. It's time to have fewer conversations like this and a lot more about how to make sure these conversations are a thing of the past.]]> 4.12 365 dagen Nederlander
author: Naeeda Aurangzeb
name: Christine
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves: dei, dutch, non-fiction, memoir
review:
This books is a collection of recollected conversations and interactions between people of the global majority and Dutch interlocutors. It struck me in the same way that Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine struck me; a reading experience that takes you deep into the experience of living in another person's skin.

You can read it in a day or even a couple hours. Each page is brief. Each interaction is brief. Sometimes it starts to feel repetitive. Sometimes you wonder if the topics will change.

As you read, remind yourself that there are people who are facing this every single day. They cannot put the book down. They cannot walk away. They cannot decide it's not for them.

This book belongs on bookshelves, but also in waiting rooms and classrooms throughout the Netherlands. It's time to have fewer conversations like this and a lot more about how to make sure these conversations are a thing of the past.
]]> <![CDATA[The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)]]> 41017660 Blithe Spirit—Flavia will do anything, even take to the skies, to land a killer.

Acclaim for Alan Bradley’s beloved Flavia de Luce novels, winners of the Crime Writers� Association Debut Dagger Award, Barry Award, Agatha Award, Macavity Award, Dilys Winn Award, and Arthur Ellis Award

“If ever there were a sleuth who’s bold, brilliant, and, yes, adorable, it’s Flavia de Luce.��USA Today

“Irresistibly appealing.� —The New York Times Book Review , on A Red Herring Without Mustard

“Original, charming, devilishly creative.�—BǴǰǰٱ, on I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Delightful and entertaining.��San Jose Mercury News, on Speaking from Among the Bones]]> 338 Alan Bradley 0345539699 Christine 2
Easy to read, moves quickly from one thing to the next. I skim all the chemistry and hardly paid attention to who the different characters were.

The characters ultimately differentiated themselves by things like occupation and relationship to other characters, not because they're well developed. The book centers around the experiences of Flavia de Luce and perhaps it makes sense that a child would deliver self-centered observations of the world. In the end, I think I like the precocious, young, savvy, chemist premise of the main character more than the books past the first couple.]]> 4.23 2014 The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)
author: Alan Bradley
name: Christine
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/29
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves: book-candy, library-book, mystery
review:
My first read from the Edmonton Public Library.

Easy to read, moves quickly from one thing to the next. I skim all the chemistry and hardly paid attention to who the different characters were.

The characters ultimately differentiated themselves by things like occupation and relationship to other characters, not because they're well developed. The book centers around the experiences of Flavia de Luce and perhaps it makes sense that a child would deliver self-centered observations of the world. In the end, I think I like the precocious, young, savvy, chemist premise of the main character more than the books past the first couple.
]]> Transcendent Kingdom 58208946 Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.]]> 290 Yaa Gyasi 1984899767 Christine 4 black-authors
Transcendent Kingdom is a well-written, deep reaching novel of reflection and inquiry. More than anything, main character Gifty is trying to figure out how she arrived where she is when the novel starts and whether she wants to change that trajectory and what it would take.

She's the remaining daughter of separated Ghanian immigrant parents and survived her brother's death by overdose. She's an academic star working on her PhD at Stanford. She's the daughter of a deeply Christian mother. She's struggling to find what God's place is in her neuroscience research. She's solitary and unreachable. She's trying to reach out to her mother through a deep depression.

It's a beautiful book about being caught between and struggling to decide whether to act and which action to take. It's nothing like Homegoing, which was alright. This is a novel with depth, one that may make you uncomfortable and will provoke you to think.

I recommend it.]]> 4.09 2020 Transcendent Kingdom
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Christine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/26
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves: black-authors
review:
I picked this book up at the airport and read it during the first week of an international move, which is to say I didn't read it with the attention it deserves.

Transcendent Kingdom is a well-written, deep reaching novel of reflection and inquiry. More than anything, main character Gifty is trying to figure out how she arrived where she is when the novel starts and whether she wants to change that trajectory and what it would take.

She's the remaining daughter of separated Ghanian immigrant parents and survived her brother's death by overdose. She's an academic star working on her PhD at Stanford. She's the daughter of a deeply Christian mother. She's struggling to find what God's place is in her neuroscience research. She's solitary and unreachable. She's trying to reach out to her mother through a deep depression.

It's a beautiful book about being caught between and struggling to decide whether to act and which action to take. It's nothing like Homegoing, which was alright. This is a novel with depth, one that may make you uncomfortable and will provoke you to think.

I recommend it.
]]> Amnesty 51187017 A riveting, suspenseful and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder—and thereby risk deportation.

Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.

But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.

Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.]]> 352 Aravind Adiga 1509879048 Christine 0 to-read 3.22 2020 Amnesty
author: Aravind Adiga
name: Christine
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Trouble with Goats and Sheep]]> 40606286 The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and utterly charming debut about a community in need of absolution and two girls learning what it means to belong.

England, 1976. Mrs. Creasy is missing and the Avenue is alive with whispers. The neighbors blame her sudden disappearance on the heat wave, but ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly aren’t convinced. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, the girls decide to take matters into their own hands. Inspired by the local vicar, they go looking for God—they believe that if they find Him they might also find Mrs. Creasy and bring her home.

Spunky, spirited Grace and quiet, thoughtful Tilly go door to door in search of clues. The cul-de-sac starts to give up its secrets, and the amateur detectives uncover much more than ever imagined. As they try to make sense of what they’ve seen and heard, a complicated history of deception begins to emerge. Everyone on the Avenue has something to hide, a reason for not fitting in.

In the suffocating heat of the summer, the ability to guard these differences becomes impossible. Along with the parched lawns and the melting pavement, the lives of all the neighbors begin to unravel. What the girls don’t realize is that the lies told to conceal what happened one fateful day about a decade ago are the same ones Mrs. Creasy was beginning to peel back just before she disappeared.]]> 369 Joanna Cannon 150112191X Christine 0 to-read 3.60 2016 The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
author: Joanna Cannon
name: Christine
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sabotage: How to Get Out of Your Own Way]]> 53142768
Howdo we getout ofour own way? With personal stories and research-based insights multi-hyphenate Emma Gannon explores her own relationship with self-sabotage and presents a quick, meaningful guide to help you recognize your own forms of self doubt, identify what is holding you back,and the steps you can take to loosen its grip.

]]> 96 Emma Gannon 152486241X Christine 0 3.90 2020 Sabotage: How to Get Out of Your Own Way
author: Emma Gannon
name: Christine
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/21
date added: 2021/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> The Method 13130107
The Method, set in the middle of the twenty-first century, deals with pressing questions: to what extent can the state curtail the rights of the individual? And does the individual have a right to resist? Juli Zeh has written a thrilling and visionary book about our future, and our present.]]> 230 Juli Zeh 1846554276 Christine 0 3.23 2009 The Method
author: Juli Zeh
name: Christine
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/21
date added: 2021/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Jillian: A Novel 49344750
Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, thirty-five-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.

Megan and Jillian's lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms--denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian's case, the misguided purchase of a dog--send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, Jillian is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.]]> 208 Halle Butler 014313552X Christine 0 Miranda July and Otessa Moshfegh leave me wondering about what is so compelling about unlikeable characters.

Their choices are so perverse, their thinking so unbelievable that we keep reading despite what can feel like a lack of plot. Things happen, but they don't always feel like they add up to narrative. Is this what happens when character study is all that matters?

I don't know if I like this book or others like it. But I appreciate them, learn from reading them, and am enjoying having my sense of narrative and storytelling provoked so thoroughly.]]> 3.35 2015 Jillian: A Novel
author: Halle Butler
name: Christine
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/05
date added: 2021/06/08
shelves:
review:
Remarkably unlikeable characters. This book, along with books by authors like Miranda July and Otessa Moshfegh leave me wondering about what is so compelling about unlikeable characters.

Their choices are so perverse, their thinking so unbelievable that we keep reading despite what can feel like a lack of plot. Things happen, but they don't always feel like they add up to narrative. Is this what happens when character study is all that matters?

I don't know if I like this book or others like it. But I appreciate them, learn from reading them, and am enjoying having my sense of narrative and storytelling provoked so thoroughly.
]]> Where'd You Go, Bernadette 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Christine 5 3.87 2012 Where'd You Go, Bernadette
author: Maria Semple
name: Christine
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/24
date added: 2021/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Unsettled Ground 53341634 What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.
_]]> 289 Claire Fuller 0241457440 Christine 0 to-read 3.74 2021 Unsettled Ground
author: Claire Fuller
name: Christine
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> House of Leaves 24800
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.]]> 710 Mark Z. Danielewski Christine 0 2020, to-read 4.11 2000 House of Leaves
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Christine
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves: 2020, to-read
review:

]]> Brown Girl Dreaming 20821284
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.]]> 337 Jacqueline Woodson 0399252517 Christine 0 to-read 4.14 2014 Brown Girl Dreaming
author: Jacqueline Woodson
name: Christine
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Steppenwolf 16631 Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet his novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any of the others".]]> 256 Hermann Hesse 0140282580 Christine 0 to-read 4.15 1927 Steppenwolf
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Christine
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams]]> 36303871
Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why its absence is so damaging to our health. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking, and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

Now, in this book, the first of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleep delves in to everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.]]> 360 Matthew Walker 0141983760 Christine 0 to-read 4.41 2017 Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
author: Matthew Walker
name: Christine
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Kingdom of This World 669450 The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime--built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French--in an orgy of voodoo, racial hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.
]]> 186 Alejo Carpentier 0374521972 Christine 0 3.83 1949 The Kingdom of This World
author: Alejo Carpentier
name: Christine
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Into the Wild (Warriors, #1) 1293894 Warriors #1: Into the Wild.

For generations, four Clans of wild cats have shared the forest according to the laws laid down by their ancestors. But the warrior code is threatened, and the ThunderClan cats are in grave danger. The sinister ShadowClan grows stronger every day. Noble warriors are dying and some deaths are more mysterious than others.

In the midst of this turmoil appears an ordinary housecat named Rusty . . . who may turn out to be the bravest warrior of them all.

Supports the Common Core State Standards

"]]> 272 Erin Hunter 0060000023 Christine 0 4.16 2003 Into the Wild (Warriors, #1)
author: Erin Hunter
name: Christine
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2021/05/17
date added: 2021/05/17
shelves:
review:

]]> In the Dream House 52392992 "A dark jewel reflecting something startling—familiar and strange" —Suzanne Moore, The Guardian
"Ravishingly beautiful" �Observer
"Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read" �Esquire

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.

Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.]]> 265 Carmen Maria Machado 1782835369 Christine 0 to-read 4.30 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Christine
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Scott Fitzgerald 18111651 364 Andrew Turnbull Christine 0 non-fiction, writing 3.80 1962 Scott Fitzgerald
author: Andrew Turnbull
name: Christine
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves: non-fiction, writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pilfer Academy: A School So Bad It's Criminal]]> 25716688
Unfortunately, not thieving is not an option at Pilfer Academy, and "misbehaving" students face Dean Deanbuggle's favorite punishment—the Whirlyblerg! In order to gain their freedom, George and Tabitha must pull the biggest heist the school has ever seen and reveal their true colors not as thieves, but as kind (and, okay, mischievous) kids.]]> 272 Lauren Magaziner 0803739192 Christine 0 to-read 4.08 2016 Pilfer Academy: A School So Bad It's Criminal
author: Lauren Magaziner
name: Christine
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Year of the Rabbit 43317483 One family’s quest to survive the devastation of the Khmer Rouge

Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family’s desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country’s major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens.

Cartoonist Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Khmer Rouge takeover, as his family set forth on the chaotic mass exodus from Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit is based on firsthand accounts, all told from the perspective of his parents and other close relatives. Stripped of any money or material possessions, Veasna’s family found themselves exiled to the barren countryside along with thousands of others, where food was scarce and brutal violence a constant threat.

Year of the Rabbit shows the reality of life in the work camps, where Veasna’s family bartered for goods, where children were instructed to spy on their parents, and where reading was proof positive of being a class traitor. Constantly on the edge of annihilation, they realized there was only one choice—they had to escape Cambodia and become refugees. Veasna has created a harrowing, deeply personal account of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.]]> 380 Tian Veasna 1770463763 Christine 0 to-read 4.06 2020 Year of the Rabbit
author: Tian Veasna
name: Christine
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Secret History 70897
Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.]]> 629 Donna Tartt 0140167773 Christine 5 4.25 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Christine
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 84, Charing Cross Road 49224119 Miss Hanff described herself as ‘a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books� which she was unable to satisfy as ‘all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or grimy, marked-up school copies�. She enclosed a list of her ‘most pressing problems�, one of which was a Latin Bible. Marks & Co.’s polite but formal reply regretted they were unable to supply the particular volume she described, but enquired if she would like them to send ‘a Latin New Testament, also a Greek New Testament, ordinary modern editions in cloth binding�.

When she began writing to Marks & Co., Helene Hanff was in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and journalist. Having dropped out of college, she had decided to take her education into her own hands, and this had already led her down some little-frequented literary pathways which, with the passage of time, became ever more esoteric.

After a while, however, letters between the feisty, eccentric New York writer and the staff of the bookshop in Charing Cross Road began to encompass much more than books. Gradually the distant ‘FDP� who first signed Marks & Co.’s letters emerged as ‘Frank Doel�, and ‘Faithfully Yours� gave way to ‘With best wishes�, and eventually simply ‘Love Frank�. Soon the whole office was joining in, slipping in notes about their families, describing life in London, and thanking her for the food parcels she sent from New York.

It was a correspondence that would last for twenty years. By the time Helene Hanff made it to London in 1971, Frank Doel was dead and London was a different place. She never made her fortune as a scriptwriter, but when she finally had the idea of making the letters into a book, it became a bestseller. It’s a gloriously heart-warming read, the account of a friendship � almost a love story � conducted through books that captures the essence of a slower, gentler era.

Pages: 240
Format: 110 x 170
Publication date: 1 September 2019
Producer: Smith Settle
Genre: Memoir
Binding: Cloth hardback
Trimmings: Coloured endpapers; silk ribbon, head- & tailband; gold blocking to spine
Preface: Maggie Fergusson]]> 240 Helene Hanff 1910898309 Christine 5 84, Charing Cross Road and City of Girlstake place in the same city at about the same time. And yet, no books could have two such different protagonists. 84 isn’t really about New York City at all, instead it’s an epistolary story based on letters exchanged between Hanff in New York City and a used bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London.

We don’t write letters much anymore, but I used to write almost daily letters to friends across the globe when I was in boarding school. The delayed and deliberate conversations that happen through the mail are different from the electronic conversation we have today. A delayed letter can evoke more anxiety than an email answered a few days or weeks too late. Plus, letter writing brings with it an intimacy that bubbles up through the letters in this collection. On the one hand it seems odd that Hanff struck up such a close relationship with this bookshop, on the other hand, why not? After all, it did happen and Hanff seems like an incredibly impulsive, energetic person, the kind of person who could take a liking to a stranger and invite them over for dinner.

Half of the joy of reading this book was the tactile joy of reading a book. I’ve had a subscription to their quarterly literary magazine for a few years now and eye the catalog that comes with every edition. Whatever expectation I might have had, this blew them all out of the water. The pages are soft and creamy, the cover is the prettiest color of soft blue-green. This book almost insists that you get yourself a high-backed chair, cozy fireplace, warm lap blanket, and appropriate beverage before you open the covers. I’d love a library of them, but for now, one will do.]]> 4.61 1970 84, Charing Cross Road
author: Helene Hanff
name: Christine
average rating: 4.61
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/12
date added: 2021/04/20
shelves:
review:
As I write this, I realize that 84, Charing Cross Road and City of Girlstake place in the same city at about the same time. And yet, no books could have two such different protagonists. 84 isn’t really about New York City at all, instead it’s an epistolary story based on letters exchanged between Hanff in New York City and a used bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London.

We don’t write letters much anymore, but I used to write almost daily letters to friends across the globe when I was in boarding school. The delayed and deliberate conversations that happen through the mail are different from the electronic conversation we have today. A delayed letter can evoke more anxiety than an email answered a few days or weeks too late. Plus, letter writing brings with it an intimacy that bubbles up through the letters in this collection. On the one hand it seems odd that Hanff struck up such a close relationship with this bookshop, on the other hand, why not? After all, it did happen and Hanff seems like an incredibly impulsive, energetic person, the kind of person who could take a liking to a stranger and invite them over for dinner.

Half of the joy of reading this book was the tactile joy of reading a book. I’ve had a subscription to their quarterly literary magazine for a few years now and eye the catalog that comes with every edition. Whatever expectation I might have had, this blew them all out of the water. The pages are soft and creamy, the cover is the prettiest color of soft blue-green. This book almost insists that you get yourself a high-backed chair, cozy fireplace, warm lap blanket, and appropriate beverage before you open the covers. I’d love a library of them, but for now, one will do.
]]> CITY OF GIRLS 42248397
'Glamorous, sexy, compelling ... Ad dictive . Radical and refreshing to read' DOLLY ALDERTON, SUNDAY TIMES 'A masterpiece' Evening Standard

It is the summer of 1940. Nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris arrives in New York with her suitcase and sewing machine, exiled by her despairing parents. Although her quicksilver talents with a needle and commitment to mastering the perfect hair roll have been deemed insufficient for her to pass into her sophomore year of Vassar, she soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her unconventional Aunt Peg's charmingly disreputable Manhattan revue theatre. There, Vivian quickly becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming the trash and tinsel only fit for the cheap seats into creations for goddesses. Exile in New York is no exile at here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends mean to drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. And when the legendary English actress Edna Watson comes to the Lily to star in the company's most ambitious show ever, Vivian is entranced by the magic that follows in her wake. But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regrettable mistakes to be made. Vivian learns that to live the life she wants, she must live many lives, ceaselessly and ingeniously making them new. 'At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is,' she confides. And so Vivian sets forth her story, and that of the women around her - women who have lived as they truly are, out of step with a century that could never quite keep up with them.]]> 480 GILBERT ELIZABETH 1408867044 Christine 4 Eat, Pray, Love, it grabbed me and I now regularly use the film as an example of story structure. When I readBig Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, I ended up taking pages of notes and writing out lots of quotes. She’s a morning page writer and actively works to champion Black women. I like her.

City of Girls is the story of a young woman who doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to being an upstanding east coast daughter sent off university to get her Mrs. degree and ends up working in her aunt’s theater in NYC instead. The book is about losing your innocence and learning about friendship and making mistakes and learning that sometimes, apologies aren’t enough. I enjoyed it.

It’s structured as a letter from the narrator to a woman who wants to know about the narrator’s relationship with the father. Structurally, I thought this was lovely. Throughout the novel, each man introduced in the story could have been the father, each relationship could have been the one in question. This little bit of mystery kept me extra alert while I was reading and I enjoyed that even if it reminded me of the “How I Met Your Mother� premise.

What this book does well is explore the way theater life was (is?) a haven for people who didn’t fit into a set of social rules that allowed for limited self-expression. It does this while exposing the way young adults can be uniquely and destructively self-absorbed. Just when the book felt like it was mostly about fun and games turning into trouble, it settled down into something serious that gave it a depth I truly appreciated.]]> 4.05 2019 CITY OF GIRLS
author: GILBERT ELIZABETH
name: Christine
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/04
date added: 2021/04/20
shelves:
review:
I’ve been a little hesitant to hop on the Liz Gilbert train. It’s too easy to like her, too easy to enjoy so many things about her and part of me is cautious. But when I listened to Eat, Pray, Love, it grabbed me and I now regularly use the film as an example of story structure. When I readBig Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, I ended up taking pages of notes and writing out lots of quotes. She’s a morning page writer and actively works to champion Black women. I like her.

City of Girls is the story of a young woman who doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to being an upstanding east coast daughter sent off university to get her Mrs. degree and ends up working in her aunt’s theater in NYC instead. The book is about losing your innocence and learning about friendship and making mistakes and learning that sometimes, apologies aren’t enough. I enjoyed it.

It’s structured as a letter from the narrator to a woman who wants to know about the narrator’s relationship with the father. Structurally, I thought this was lovely. Throughout the novel, each man introduced in the story could have been the father, each relationship could have been the one in question. This little bit of mystery kept me extra alert while I was reading and I enjoyed that even if it reminded me of the “How I Met Your Mother� premise.

What this book does well is explore the way theater life was (is?) a haven for people who didn’t fit into a set of social rules that allowed for limited self-expression. It does this while exposing the way young adults can be uniquely and destructively self-absorbed. Just when the book felt like it was mostly about fun and games turning into trouble, it settled down into something serious that gave it a depth I truly appreciated.
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