Michelle's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 22 Mar 2025 09:03:37 -0700 60 Michelle's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Family Happiness 57601775
Kind yet candid, as all of Laurie Colwin's books are, Family Happiness is a heartfelt novel about a midlife crisis and a woman tired of being taken for granted––and a reminder that family, like happiness, can take many forms.

This 2021 reissue has a new cover by Olivia McGiff.

An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.]]> 275 Laurie Colwin 0593313577 Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.81 1982 Family Happiness
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Hungerstone 212342605 HungerstoneĚýis a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’sĚýA Dowry of BloodĚýand Emilia Hart’sĚýWeyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution,ĚýHungerstoneĚýis a compulsive feminist reworking ofĚýCarmilla, the book that inspiredĚýDracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]> 336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 Michelle 2 4.03 2025 Hungerstone
author: Kat Dunn
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
Bloodless, sexless, swagless—and with YA prose to boot.
]]> The Coin 199349912 A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.]]> 240 Yasmin Zaher 1646222105 Michelle 3 3.51 2024 The Coin
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Victorian Psycho 213395480 From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance.

Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .

Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.]]> 208 Virginia Feito 1631498630 Michelle 1
Two random specific points of contention: the first, and biggest, is that this is obviously supposed to be in conversation with Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho but it seems to have misunderstood and mismanaged every single thing about that story, most especially the satirical commentary on the era it's depicting via the main character. The second is that the main character is routinely described, and insulted by others, as fat, so it should be of no surprise Margaret Qualley will be playing her in the announced film adaptation. ]]> 3.63 2025 Victorian Psycho
author: Virginia Feito
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:
Bad to the point of parody. What if you were a GOVERNESS with an obvious SECRET and a PSYCHOPATHIC thirst for REVENGE and DEAD BABIES and your soul is definitely EVIL but also it was CHRISTMAS. If everything is gross and violent, maggot-filled and murdered dead, then none of these things really are; if you can't care a lick about a single character there are no stakes. Dumb, boring and, frankly, embarrassing how hard this tries to be Nasty and Violent by throwing dozens of sodden corpses at the wall.

Two random specific points of contention: the first, and biggest, is that this is obviously supposed to be in conversation with Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho but it seems to have misunderstood and mismanaged every single thing about that story, most especially the satirical commentary on the era it's depicting via the main character. The second is that the main character is routinely described, and insulted by others, as fat, so it should be of no surprise Margaret Qualley will be playing her in the announced film adaptation.
]]> Too Soon 214152335
Arabella and Aziz’s instant connection reminds Zoya of the passion she once felt for Aziz’s grandfather, a man she desired desperately, even after her father arranged another husband for her. In turn, Zoya would later marry off her youngest daughter, Naya, who aspired to date the Jackson 5 and wasn’t ready to be a wife or mother to Arabella at sixteen. Now that Naya’s children are grown and she’s arrived at an abrupt midlife crossroads, it’s time to settle old scores…]]> 336 Betty Shamieh 1668046547 Michelle 0 Sex and the City." Entering with those expectations, disappointment was really the only possible outcome because this book is very much not that. Half of it's historical fiction, spinning the roulette wheel of all the usual midcentury tropes, and then some, all written in socially enlightened present-day speak (the funniest example might be the gay black man teaching the main character's grandmother English in 1960s Detroit, saying to her: "I'm gay and in an open relationship." ok! sure!) and way too many expository historical info-dumps that absolutely wrecked the pacing (the stuff with Yoav's mother was especially oddly placed and paced), but what really took me out of the novel was that all-too-common historical fiction trope of alternating chapters between the past and the present and having present events uncannily parallel whatever the character's mother or grandmother experienced.

I think I'm going to give Isabella Hamad's Enter Ghost a read next––which is, also!, about staging a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.]]> 3.90 2025 Too Soon
author: Betty Shamieh
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
Look, this one might be on me––and The Atlantic, which described this book as "a Palestinian-American Sex and the City." Entering with those expectations, disappointment was really the only possible outcome because this book is very much not that. Half of it's historical fiction, spinning the roulette wheel of all the usual midcentury tropes, and then some, all written in socially enlightened present-day speak (the funniest example might be the gay black man teaching the main character's grandmother English in 1960s Detroit, saying to her: "I'm gay and in an open relationship." ok! sure!) and way too many expository historical info-dumps that absolutely wrecked the pacing (the stuff with Yoav's mother was especially oddly placed and paced), but what really took me out of the novel was that all-too-common historical fiction trope of alternating chapters between the past and the present and having present events uncannily parallel whatever the character's mother or grandmother experienced.

I think I'm going to give Isabella Hamad's Enter Ghost a read next––which is, also!, about staging a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.
]]> The Parasites 7994502 318 Daphne du Maurier Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.60 1949 The Parasites
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Hypocrite 202102022 From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might hope, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with, and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.]]> 240 Jo Hamya 0593701038 Michelle 3 3.42 2024 The Hypocrite
author: Jo Hamya
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves:
review:

]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.87 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Private Rites 199645404 From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded
It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else

It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.

Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.

As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world.]]> 327 Julia Armfield 0008608032 Michelle 4 3.82 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
3.5; I desperately need Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ to go Letterboxd and give me those half-stars.
]]> When We Lost Our Heads 58446244 A spellbinding story about two girls whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the trajectory of history.

Marie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At 12 years old, with her blond curls and her unparalleled sense of whimsey, she's the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, an affluent strip of 19th century Montreal. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly, and brilliant, moves to the neighborhood.

Marie and Sadie are immediately united by their passion and intensity, and they attract and repel each other in ways that light each of them on fire. Marie with her bubbly charm sees the light and sweetness of the world, whereas Sadie's obsession with darkness is all consuming. Soon their childlike games take on a thrill of danger and then become deadly.

Forced to separate, they spend their teenage years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity--until a singular event unites them once more, with dizzying effects. And after Marie inherits her father's sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city's gritty underworld, a revolution of the working class begins to foment. Each of them will have unexpected roles to play in events that upend their city--the only question is whether they will find each other once more.

Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal's wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can't let someone go.]]> 448 Heather O'Neill 0593422902 Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.94 2022 When We Lost Our Heads
author: Heather O'Neill
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Michelle 5 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Peggy 202102027 A dazzling novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself—by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge, now a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone

“Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.

Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

Rebecca Godfrey’s final book—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, following Godfrey’s death in 2022—brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius.]]> 384 Rebecca Godfrey 0385538286 Michelle 3 3.51 2024 Peggy
author: Rebecca Godfrey
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves:
review:
Too hagiographic to be as interesting as I wanted it to be (and, frankly, too much tin-eared dialogue that was inconsistently stylized: unmarked, sometimes italicized, sometimes given punctuation marks) and the pacing either breezed through moments I wanted to linger in or stalled where I didn't, but I ultimately felt a real fondness for this by the time I was done––though I think I have a hard time separating that fondness for the novel from .
]]> The Material 199928287
Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade.

Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there's a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punchline will either get you to a punchline or force you to be one.

They’re all afraid to be one.

Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students� respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.

Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian, Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.

Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh, and the longing to make others laugh even harder.]]> 288 Camille Bordas 0593729846 Michelle 4 Manny had brought the newspapers as a joke, and his son hadn’t gotten it.

A really wonderful novel I really enjoyed making my way through. There's a whole revolving door of characters here that Bordas leaps in and out of rapidly but always at ease, and I felt I came to know each of them individually and she was always able to establish them as actual people. There's an authenticity to the story told here; too often any novel that invokes a lot of pop culture feels dated even as it's picked up hot off the press, but maybe it's the timelessness of the references here, or maybe it's simply that Bordas knows her stuff, but all of it worked for me. I found myself oddly moved at various points, and I know the term "cinematic" has become a pejorative, but I could see that cold day in Chicago clearly and all these people making their way through it, and idk! I love comedy! And so does Bordas! ]]> 3.33 2024 The Material
author: Camille Bordas
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
Manny had brought the newspapers as a joke, and his son hadn’t gotten it.

A really wonderful novel I really enjoyed making my way through. There's a whole revolving door of characters here that Bordas leaps in and out of rapidly but always at ease, and I felt I came to know each of them individually and she was always able to establish them as actual people. There's an authenticity to the story told here; too often any novel that invokes a lot of pop culture feels dated even as it's picked up hot off the press, but maybe it's the timelessness of the references here, or maybe it's simply that Bordas knows her stuff, but all of it worked for me. I found myself oddly moved at various points, and I know the term "cinematic" has become a pejorative, but I could see that cold day in Chicago clearly and all these people making their way through it, and idk! I love comedy! And so does Bordas!
]]> <![CDATA[Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)]]> 34854714 The hotly-anticipated sequel to SIX OF CROWS, this is GAME OF THRONES meets OCEAN'S ELEVEN in a fantasy epic from the number 1 NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Leigh Bardugo.

Welcome to the world of the Grisha.

After pulling off a seemingly impossible heist in the notorious Ice Court, criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker feels unstoppable. But life is about to take a dangerous turn - and with friends who are among the deadliest outcasts in Ketterdam city, Kaz is going to need more than luck to survive in this unforgiving underworld.

As gripping, sweeping and memorable as the Grisha trilogy - SHADOW AND BONE, SIEGE AND STORM and RUIN AND RISING - this novel is perfect for fans of Laini Taylor, Kristin Cashore and GAME OF THRONES.

]]> 478 Leigh Bardugo 1780622325 Michelle 5 WHAT A RIDE 4.51 2016 Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/10/03
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
WHAT A RIDE
]]> <![CDATA[Hey Harry, Hey Matilda: A Novel]]> 32795898 Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is the story—told entirely in hilarious emails—of fraternal twins Harry and Matilda Goodman as they fumble into adulthood, telling lies and keeping secrets, and finally confronting their complicated twinship.

Matilda Goodman is an underemployed wedding photographer grappling with her failure to live as an artist and the very bad lie she has told her boyfriend (that she has a dead twin). Harry, her (totally alive) brother, is an untenured professor of literature, anxiously contemplating his publishing status (unpublished) and sleeping with a student. When Matilda invites her boyfriend home for Thanksgiving to meet the family, and when Harry makes a desperate—and unethical—move to save his career, they set off an avalanche of shame, scandal, and drunken hot tub revelations that force them to examine the truth about who they really are. A wonderfully subversive, sensitive novel of romantic entanglement and misguided ambition, Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is a joyful look at love and family in all its forms.]]> 272 Rachel Hulin 0385541686 Michelle 2 2.73 2017 Hey Harry, Hey Matilda: A Novel
author: Rachel Hulin
name: Michelle
average rating: 2.73
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2018/04/28
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Michelle 1
Or, Solipsism: The Novel. Coco Mellors is a grown woman yet she writes about adulthood the same way young girls play with Barbies: it’s such a surface-level, juvenile, daydream-y idea of what a glamorous interesting life should or can be. Which can be fine, even fun!, to read, but this is a silly novel not only far too in love with itself (and with some really fucked politics—the way anyone who isn’t white is used as an accessory to the girls here is…�..something, and I’m not even going to touch what the narrative does with the Lesbian Sister), but so self-serious and with such delusions of being literary fiction, I have to laugh.]]> 3.94 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
The hardest thing about being a beautiful thin white woman at the top of your field is that sometimes there are four of you and all of you are sisters and all of you have a special Addiction that makes you act out afterschool specials all the time (or just Box Really Good and live as a boxer monk who has never heard of fentanyl but it’s okay boxer monk is addicted instead to Punches and her Russian coach who talks like a Bond villain) while reminding yourself and each other of the biological supremacy of Sisterhood (Coco says, only sisters who shared the same womb are real sisters!) and also your eroticized white thinness and how badly everyone wants to fuck you even though you’re so sad and so special and such a beautiful disaster :(

Or, Solipsism: The Novel. Coco Mellors is a grown woman yet she writes about adulthood the same way young girls play with Barbies: it’s such a surface-level, juvenile, daydream-y idea of what a glamorous interesting life should or can be. Which can be fine, even fun!, to read, but this is a silly novel not only far too in love with itself (and with some really fucked politics—the way anyone who isn’t white is used as an accessory to the girls here is…�..something, and I’m not even going to touch what the narrative does with the Lesbian Sister), but so self-serious and with such delusions of being literary fiction, I have to laugh.
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Michelle 0 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:
DNF @ 26%. My life is too short for whatever this is.
]]> The Pairing 199440249 definitely not.

Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.

Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.]]> 432 Casey McQuiston 1250862744 Michelle 0 3.70 2024 The Pairing
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires]]> 44074800 Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she--and her book club--are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.]]> 410 Grady Hendrix Michelle 3 3.78 2020 The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/05/12
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Michelle 2 good Rooney is at what she does. This was tremendously tedious, exhaustive verisimilitude mistaken for depth or character. I truly hated how much of this hinged on miscommunication and withholding information from each other as a catalyst for Drama. None of these characters, or their relationships, captivated me, each spin on the POV roulette wheel essentially reading the same. It's also criminal to present me with a beached whale in the Thames, a marine biologist who goes viral because she looks just like Princess Diana AND is having an affair with a celebrity chef and then just.......use all of That as a sprig of parsley on your overcooked meal. I want that novel, please. ]]> 3.78 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: OisĂ­n McKenna
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:
I find it fascinating how often novels are compared to Sally Rooney’s work, accidentally revealing just how good Rooney is at what she does. This was tremendously tedious, exhaustive verisimilitude mistaken for depth or character. I truly hated how much of this hinged on miscommunication and withholding information from each other as a catalyst for Drama. None of these characters, or their relationships, captivated me, each spin on the POV roulette wheel essentially reading the same. It's also criminal to present me with a beached whale in the Thames, a marine biologist who goes viral because she looks just like Princess Diana AND is having an affair with a celebrity chef and then just.......use all of That as a sprig of parsley on your overcooked meal. I want that novel, please.
]]> Life's Work: A Memoir 168678548
“This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE NPR, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews

“I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating and we aren’t in touch.� So begins David Milch’s urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch’s life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace.

Betting on racehorses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law School only to be expelled for shooting out streetlights with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers� Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the most lauded television series of all time, made a family, and pursued sobriety, then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him.

Like Milch’s best screenwriting, Life’s Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception, and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a master class on Milch’s unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all.]]> 304 David Milch 0525510761 Michelle 4 Deadwood rewatch.]]> 4.38 2022 Life's Work: A Memoir
author: David Milch
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/02
shelves:
review:
Time to start my Deadwood rewatch.
]]> Diavola 126918202 Jennifer Thorne skewers all-too-familiar family dynamics in this sly, wickedly funny vacation-Gothic. Beautifully unhinged and deeply satisfying, Diavola is a sharp twist on the classic haunted house story, exploring loneliness, belonging, and the seemingly inescapable bonds of family mythology.

Anna has two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly and survive.

It isn’t easy when she’s the only one in the family who doesn’t quite fit in. Her twin brother, Benny, goes with the flow so much he’s practically dissolved, and her older sister, Nicole, is so used to everyone—including her blandly docile husband and two kids—falling in line that Anna often ends up in trouble for simply asking a question. Mom seizes every opportunity to question her life choices, and Dad, when not reminding everyone who paid for this vacation, just wants some peace and quiet.

The gorgeous, remote villa in tiny Monteperso seems like a perfect place to endure so much family togetherness, until things start going off the rails—the strange noises at night, the unsettling warnings from the local villagers, and the dark, violent past of the villa itself.

(Warning: May invoke feelings of irritation, dread, and despair that come with large family gatherings.)]]> 296 Jennifer Marie Thorne Michelle 3 3.85 2024 Diavola
author: Jennifer Marie Thorne
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/26
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty]]> 16044969
Often compared to the Kennedy clan because of the tragedies and scandals that had befallen both wealthy and powerful families, Crazy Rich , based on scores of exclusive, candid, on-the-record interviews, reveals how the dynasty's vast fortune was both intoxicating and toxic through the generations of a family that gave the world Band-Aids and Baby Oil.

At the same time, they've been termed perhaps the most dysfunctional family in the fortune 500. Oppenheimer is the author of biographies of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Hiltons and Martha Stewart, among other American icons.]]> 496 Jerry Oppenheimer 0312662114 Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.12 2013 Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty
author: Jerry Oppenheimer
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Henry Henry 182108722 Henry Henry is a queer reimagining of Shakespeare's Henriad, transposing the legend of Henry V's wayward youth into 21st-century Britain in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum.

Henry Henry follows Hal Lancaster�22, gay, Catholic—as he spends his first years out of Oxford floating between internships, drinking with his actor friends, struggling through awkward hook-ups, and occasionally going to confession to be absolved of his sins.

When a grouse shooting accident-—funny in retrospect—makes a romance out of Hal's rivalry with fumblingly leftist family friend Harry Percy, Hal finds that he wants, for the first time, to be himself. But his father Henry is an Englishman: he will not let his son escape tradition. To save himself, Hal must reckon not only with grief and shame but with the wounds of his family's past.]]> 336 Allen Bratton 196188402X Michelle 3 3.60 2024 Henry Henry
author: Allen Bratton
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves:
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]]> Sophie Calle: True Stories 18384616 104 Sophie Calle 2330023413 Michelle 5 4.46 1994 Sophie Calle: True Stories
author: Sophie Calle
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves:
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]]> Very Bad Company 195790649
When another high-level executive vanishes after the first night, the disappearance has the potential to derail the future of the company’s sale and cost everyone on the team millions. Now more than ever Caitlin and her colleagues must continue the charade—partaking in team-building exercises, group brainstorms, and dinners—to keep the future of Aurora afloat amid the fatal speculations.]]> 272 Emma Rosenblum 1250906555 Michelle 2 3.22 2024 Very Bad Company
author: Emma Rosenblum
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Fruit of the Dead 176443312
Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.

Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s own late capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.]]> 320 Rachel Lyon 1668020858 Michelle 0 3.50 2024 Fruit of the Dead
author: Rachel Lyon
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/05/25
shelves:
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Increasingly silly and over-written (the purpling prose by the end, woof) and suffered the common modern adaption woes of trying to fit the author’s story and characters to the myth with limited success, but. Making Hades essentially a Sackler pharmaceutical giant peddling opiates is an inspired choice. Shame about the execution.
]]> I Hope This Finds You Well 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Michelle 3 3.75 2024 I Hope This Finds You Well
author: Natalie Sue
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
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]]> The Impudent Ones 55948365
Marguerite Duras, the Elena Ferrante of French literature, rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L’Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras’s novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception—until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras’s classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of pre-war France.

With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, Duras depicts the scalding effect of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl. Duras’s great gift was her ability to bring to vivid and passionate life characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do.

Through its striking prose and strong feminist themes, The Impudent Ones will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.]]> 256 Marguerite Duras 162097651X Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.33 1943 The Impudent Ones
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Familiar 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]> 387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X Michelle 3 3.74 2024 The Familiar
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Old Flame 61272703 A highly anticipated new novel exploring what it means to be a woman in her many forms—daughter, friend, partner, lover, and mother.

Emily writes for women’s catalogs for a living, but she’d rather be writing books. She has a handsome photographer boyfriend, but she actively wonders how and when they will eventually hurt each other. Her best work friend Megan is her lifeline, until Megan is abruptly laid off. When her world is further upended by an unplanned pregnancy, Emily is forced to make tough decisions that will change her life forever.

What will she sacrifice from her old life to make room for a new one? What fires will she be forced to extinguish, and which will keep burning? Old Flame is a story about the essential—and often existential—choices that define a woman’s life at every level, from which dress to wear to when to have a child to how to be in the world.]]> 320 Molly Prentiss 1501121588 Michelle 3 3.84 2023 Old Flame
author: Molly Prentiss
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves:
review:

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

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Michelle 1 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2024/05/19
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves:
review:
Words fail to capture how much I hated this hackneyed overwrought sludge. The dialogue alone, woof. (Also why did every single older woman smell like tuberose?)
]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

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

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

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Michelle 0
Did I enjoy this? For the most part, yes! I had fun! I tore through this at a clip I haven't applied to any book in ages, so there's that. But. Well. By the end I was Tired, and acutely felt like something was missing. This was ambitious, with a truly inspired premise, but it read like four disparate stories and genres (slice of life "oh god they were roommates" fanfic; The Terror fanfic; personal history lit-fic focused on racism, empire, and inherited trauma; convoluted time travel spy thriller for the last fifty pages) Frankenstein-ed together to varying success. There was also a real AO3 of it All element to the book I mean both affectionately and derogatorily (I will bounce off the "Avengers Watch Disney Movies Together at Stark Tower" breed of Found Family� every. single. time.), perhaps most perilously felt in the pacing. The pacing..........is a mess. So much of this novel is just two people sitting at home together. Which could work! But paired with Everything Else happening here, I found myself groaning when they were moved to a second location only to repeat this exact same thing (High Drama at the Ministry! But enough of that, He's Making Dinner). But! I enjoyed the narrative voice a lot, and the odd metaphors and sometimes stranger word choices, and Bradley handily makes the case for Graham Gore: Heartthrob, which I adored, and I can solidly say the first chunk of this book was some of the most enjoyable reading I've done in a good long while.

(A final personal gripe: I wanted to know so much more about French Revolution Anne!!!!!!!)]]> 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves:
review:
I no longer know how to rate things.

Did I enjoy this? For the most part, yes! I had fun! I tore through this at a clip I haven't applied to any book in ages, so there's that. But. Well. By the end I was Tired, and acutely felt like something was missing. This was ambitious, with a truly inspired premise, but it read like four disparate stories and genres (slice of life "oh god they were roommates" fanfic; The Terror fanfic; personal history lit-fic focused on racism, empire, and inherited trauma; convoluted time travel spy thriller for the last fifty pages) Frankenstein-ed together to varying success. There was also a real AO3 of it All element to the book I mean both affectionately and derogatorily (I will bounce off the "Avengers Watch Disney Movies Together at Stark Tower" breed of Found Family� every. single. time.), perhaps most perilously felt in the pacing. The pacing..........is a mess. So much of this novel is just two people sitting at home together. Which could work! But paired with Everything Else happening here, I found myself groaning when they were moved to a second location only to repeat this exact same thing (High Drama at the Ministry! But enough of that, He's Making Dinner). But! I enjoyed the narrative voice a lot, and the odd metaphors and sometimes stranger word choices, and Bradley handily makes the case for Graham Gore: Heartthrob, which I adored, and I can solidly say the first chunk of this book was some of the most enjoyable reading I've done in a good long while.

(A final personal gripe: I wanted to know so much more about French Revolution Anne!!!!!!!)
]]> Milk Fed 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]> 304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Michelle 0 3.56 2021 Milk Fed
author: Melissa Broder
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:
I don't entirely know how to rate this, namely because I didn't really like this and I can't figure out if that's on me or the book. For one thing, I had somehow Mandela-effected myself into thinking this was about a woman who just had a baby (???) so the sudden dunking into the (regrettably well-traveled) land of body dysmorphia and eating disorders was a bit of shock. But I was grooving for the first chunk of the book, found the narration amusing enough, difficult as the subject matter was, and almost cheerily familiar, like revisiting a high school bully but now you're both adults. But, I don't know, man. Maybe it's all my own baggage I brought into this, but reading a (thin) author write a (thin) narrator fetishizing her fat love interest had incredibly diminishing returns. I think it's largely because the love interest never feels like a person but rather just a vessel for the narrator's own issues (body, mother, sexuality, religion) and never gets to be anything more than Fat; she's her Manic Pixie Yogurt Girl. Add to that how every sex scene is written dripping with the grotesque, rhapsodic as it might be, I don't know. Look, I love gross, I love fucky, I love horny and weird, but this book never really was any of that in a way that resonated. Horny, but never erotic; gross, but juvenile––if this was better written, if the back half of the novel felt more earned and less like everyone was just doing stuff to fulfill an outline and get us to the end, maybe I would've liked it more? Or maybe I'm the problem?
]]> Berlin 62050489 When Daphne Ferber arrives in Berlin for a fresh start in a thrilling new city, the last thing she expects is to run into more drama than she left behind.

Of course, she knew she'd need to do the usual: make friends, acquire lovers, grapple with German and a whole new way of life. She even expected the long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, and the pitfalls of online dating in another language. The paranoia, the second-guessing of her every choice, the covert behaviours? Probably come with the territory.

But one night, something strange, dangerous and entirely unexpected intervenes, and life in bohemian Kreuzberg suddenly doesn't seem so cool.

Just how much trouble is Daphne in, and who - or what - is out to get her?

Channelling the modern female experience with razor-sharp observation and witty flair, Berlin announces Bea Setton as an electrifying literary voice for her generation.]]> 256 Bea Setton 014313762X Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.56 2022 Berlin
author: Bea Setton
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Double Fault 21157264 356 Lionel Shriver Michelle 3 3.64 1997 Double Fault
author: Lionel Shriver
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/21
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> The Late Americans 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Michelle 3 very Iowa Writers Workshop Novel� sudden burst of depressing sex and violence that followed. The repetition of sex (and violence), and specifically sex without love and sex as an emotionless act of bodily reflex or sex as pain, sex as self-destruction, sex as narcotic, sex as suffering, sex as something you did because why not, grew incredibly weary for me, which is a shame because, like I said: Taylor can write. Though.........he cannot write women. It's a shame how much rich interiority was afforded to every single man in this story while the women shared a uniformly nagging shrillness (I'd say humorlessness too, but bar Seamus, I think that might apply to all the characters here). The two chapters from the lone women in the novel were, well, the less the said the better, and the women as portrayed in Seamus's poetry seminar went past parody into shrieking-harpy-ugly.

This makes it sound like I didn't like this novel, and I did! It was also just a frustrating read where I wanted the greatness of the prose to yield more in terms of actual narrative.]]> 3.35 2023 The Late Americans
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
shelves:
review:
I'm not entirely sure how to rate this, seeing as the last quarter of the novel completely lost me, but boy can Taylor write. I do think this book is significantly hurt by its short story-like set-up of roving points of view; by the end they all began to read with a same-y indistinguishable voice and I think it would have been tremendously helped by focusing on one or two characters. Which, speaking of: I really did find parts of Seamus's chapters (and, to a lesser extent, Ivan's and Fyodor's) transcendent, both in terms of writing and character work. They felt like real people, they read as real people, I wanted to spend more time with them––specifically Seamus. The scene in the beginning when he shows up to work at the hospice kitchen had such a lived-in and true quality, that unfortunately was immediately broken by the very Iowa Writers Workshop Novel� sudden burst of depressing sex and violence that followed. The repetition of sex (and violence), and specifically sex without love and sex as an emotionless act of bodily reflex or sex as pain, sex as self-destruction, sex as narcotic, sex as suffering, sex as something you did because why not, grew incredibly weary for me, which is a shame because, like I said: Taylor can write. Though.........he cannot write women. It's a shame how much rich interiority was afforded to every single man in this story while the women shared a uniformly nagging shrillness (I'd say humorlessness too, but bar Seamus, I think that might apply to all the characters here). The two chapters from the lone women in the novel were, well, the less the said the better, and the women as portrayed in Seamus's poetry seminar went past parody into shrieking-harpy-ugly.

This makes it sound like I didn't like this novel, and I did! It was also just a frustrating read where I wanted the greatness of the prose to yield more in terms of actual narrative.
]]> Alice Sadie Celine 101145480
Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friends—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.

A professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.

Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.]]> 272 Sarah Blakley-Cartwright 1668021595 Michelle 2 2.97 2023 Alice Sadie Celine
author: Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
name: Michelle
average rating: 2.97
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves:
review:
1.5 stars. There's a scene in this where one of the characters is taking out the trash, which the author ploddingly describes for multiple paragraphs with such belabored flowery language I had to pause and laugh. I feel like that's one of the biggest crimes committed by this book? Flowery language, applied to trash. The actual biggest crime is the oddly hateful energy I kept wafting off the narrative when it came to sex and, specifically, lesbians. I'd say it was purposeful from the narrative, but the narrative is paper-thin with characters who just do whatever the author wants them to do, so. Yikes. (Also, as someone who grew up near Chagrin Falls, I couldn't get over the author making it out to be the backwards rural armpit of America or at least Ohio when we all used to joke about it as the rich-kids 'burb lol.)
]]> Porn: An Oral History 61889842 Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter - not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren't saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.]]> 368 Polly Barton 1804270407 Michelle 0 no one is talking about it. And yes, there's a lot to dig into on the topic of porn, especially the micro instead of the macro, personal consumption habits and its potential influence on how we perform sex or what we desire, but from what I read this never goes anywhere with it...beyond a pervading sense of shame? particularly from the author? leaving me with the question as to whether I'm a desensitized pervert? (probably.) A strange book, and what a waste of a title. ]]> 3.36 2023 Porn: An Oral History
author: Polly Barton
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves:
review:
DNF about halfway through. I'll be honest, a title like "Porn: An Oral History" implied two things about the author to me before I cracked this open or even read the blurb: a cheekiness and sense of humor about the subject and an interest in porn. Alas, neither are to be found here. The blurb is also significantly misleading; this is essentially Barton just talking to her social circle about porn, more or less reflecting back her own hang-ups and misgivings, which is a shame. Because she and her friends and past partners have never talked about porn, she seems to believe no one is talking about it. And yes, there's a lot to dig into on the topic of porn, especially the micro instead of the macro, personal consumption habits and its potential influence on how we perform sex or what we desire, but from what I read this never goes anywhere with it...beyond a pervading sense of shame? particularly from the author? leaving me with the question as to whether I'm a desensitized pervert? (probably.) A strange book, and what a waste of a title.
]]> I'm a Fan 122769136 203 Sheena Patel 1783789816 Michelle 3 3.31 2022 I'm a Fan
author: Sheena Patel
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Alphabetical Diaries 127282792
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374610789 Michelle 5 3.95 2024 Alphabetical Diaries
author: Sheila Heti
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/05
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Story of the Eye 58383 Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

This edition also includes Susan Sontag's superb study of pornography as art, 'The Pornographic Imagination', as well as Roland Barthes' essay 'The Metaphor of the Eye'.

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death. Among his other works are the novels Blue of Noon (1957) and My Mother (1966), and the essays Eroticism (1957) and Literature and Evil (1957).]]> 127 Georges Bataille 0141185384 Michelle 0 3.49 1928 Story of the Eye
author: Georges Bataille
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/08
date added: 2024/02/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Collected Works 60334013 High Fidelity meets Where'd You Go Bernadette in this Swedish runaway bestseller, a work of pure literary nostalgia for times just past.

Several years after the disappearance of his wife Cecilia, Martin Berg is tumbling into a life crisis. The owner of an ailing Swedish publishing house, he's left wondering what could have been.


Meanwhile, Martin's old and much more remarkable friend, the artist Gustav Becker, is visiting Gothenburg, plastering billboards across the city that feature the eyes of his greatest muse, Cecilia Berg.

Feeling out of place and restless in the city, Martin's daughter Rakel finds a possible clue to her mother's fate and her world begins to unravel.

A family saga of several generations, Collected Works is a story about enduring love, absence, friendship, and art in the intersection of truth and fiction.
]]> 610 Lydia Sandgren 1662601514 Michelle 0 currently-reading 4.03 2020 Collected Works
author: Lydia Sandgren
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Don't Look at Me Like That 74354594 A candid novel of love, betrayal, and friendship about a young woman who breaks with her peers, moves to London, and begins a shocking affair. “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true� confesses Meg Bailey at the start of Don’t Look at Me Like That. Coming of age in the mid-1940s, Meg finds herself to be out of place wherever she finds She is a nonbeliever in her father’s parsonage, an artistic dreamer at her stuffy boarding school, a provincial in the worldly circles frequented by her best friend Roxane and Dick, Roxane’s future husband. It is only when Meg, newly graduated from art school, moves into an untidy London rooming house alive with the sounds of crying children, sparring lovers, and even foreigners, that she begins to feel at home. But ties to the past are not so easily severed, and Meg must disentangle herself from her troubled intimacy with Roxane and Dick before she can begin to start “living in her own way.”Don’t Look at Me Like That is the only novel by the famed memoirist and editor Diana Athill, who died in 2019 at the age of one hundred and one. At once clear-eyed and compassionate, it is a story of making mistakes and making a life.]]> 194 Diana Athill 1681376121 Michelle 0 currently-reading 4.09 1967 Don't Look at Me Like That
author: Diana Athill
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Happy All the Time 57602357 Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.

This 2021 reissue includes a new foreword by Katherine Heiny and cover art by Olivia McGiff.

An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.]]> 224 Laurie Colwin 0593313895 Michelle 4 3.98 1978 Happy All the Time
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/27
date added: 2024/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Daughter 124029281 In Claudia Dey’s Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life—and art—of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.]]> 272 Claudia Dey 0374609705 Michelle 3
On the whole, I liked this. I liked the structure of it a lot, I liked the prose. I feel like it needed a little more meat to it, a little less tragedy (I literally groaned out loud as Mona's role as load-bearing wall of litfic tragedy threatened to cave in under the weight of that many too many Bad Things That Had Happened To Her as hemorrhage was added to her list of woe), though I will say the clear-eyed, sharp narrative voice kept me engaged. And for the first time in my life I can say: when Rihanna showed up, I mentally checked out. ]]> 3.93 2023 Daughter
author: Claudia Dey
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/10
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves:
review:
There was a scene early on in the novel where the main character meets with her stepmother in a sculpture garden, and I have not been able to get this single scene out of my head for days.

On the whole, I liked this. I liked the structure of it a lot, I liked the prose. I feel like it needed a little more meat to it, a little less tragedy (I literally groaned out loud as Mona's role as load-bearing wall of litfic tragedy threatened to cave in under the weight of that many too many Bad Things That Had Happened To Her as hemorrhage was added to her list of woe), though I will say the clear-eyed, sharp narrative voice kept me engaged. And for the first time in my life I can say: when Rihanna showed up, I mentally checked out.
]]> Green Dot 127282597
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.]]> 320 Madeleine Gray 1250890594 Michelle 0 3.62 2024 Green Dot
author: Madeleine Gray
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Day We're All Going to Die]]> 123169105 Sorrow and Bliss meets Normal People in this utterly compelling, darkly humorous millennial coming-of-age novel about a 27-year-old single Jewish woman in Melbourne who must learn to reconcile family expectations, cultural constraints and inter-generational trauma with her own desires. A coruscating new voice.

At 27, Naomi is just trying to be a normal person. A normal person who works at a Jewish Museum, who cares for lost things, found things, sacred things, and her family. A person who finds herself going on bad blind dates, having cringe-worthy sex, a tumultuous, toxic affair, and falling for a man called Moses.

Being a normal person would be easy and fine if she didn't bear the weight of the unspoken grief of Cookie, her Holocaust-survivor grandmother. It would all be fine if she just knew how to be, without feeling the pull of expectation, the fear of disappointing others (men, friends, her parents, humanity), and that pesky problem of being attracted to all the wrong people (according to her parents, anyway).

By endlessly trying to please everyone around her, Naomi can't seem to figure out what she wants for herself, or how to get it. With echoes of the dead and dying all about her, in objects, in story, in her grandmother's firm grasp, Naomi isn't quite sure she knows how to be a normal person, but she is going to try.

This fiercely honest, funny and fearless novel is a deep dive into the complex questions that surround culture, identity politics and generational trauma in contemporary Australia. Both a sadly affectionate and brilliantly unsparing examination of the glorious, awkward, messiness of life.]]> 240 Elise Esther Hearst 1867251272 Michelle 0 3.46 2023 One Day We're All Going to Die
author: Elise Esther Hearst
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/14
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Dead of Winter 63264519 From bestselling author Darcy Coates comes Dead of Winter, a remote cabin in the snowy wilderness thriller that will teach you to trust no one. There are eight strangers. One killer. Nowhere left to run.

When Christa joins a tour group heading deep into the snowy expanse of the Rocky Mountains, she's hopeful this will be her chance to put the ghosts of her past to rest. But when a bitterly cold snowstorm sweeps the region, the small group is forced to take shelter in an abandoned hunting cabin. Despite the uncomfortably claustrophobic quarters and rapidly dropping temperature, Christa believes they'll be safe as they wait out the storm.

She couldn't be more wrong.

Deep in the night, their tour guide goes missing...only to be discovered the following morning, his severed head impaled on a tree outside the cabin. Terrified, and completely isolated by the storm, Christa finds herself trapped with eight total strangers. One of them kills for sport...and they're far from finished. As the storm grows more dangerous and the number of survivors dwindles one by one, Christa must decide who she can trust before this frozen mountain becomes her tomb.]]> 352 Darcy Coates 1728270251 Michelle 3
And Then There None really is that bitch, and what Coates has done here is a great riff on that classic premise: a bunch of strangers, trapped in a cabin, a blizzard roaring outside, one of them a killer. The gore is over-the-top, suspension of belief is absolutely required, the author is definitely not American (the persistent use of the word "mobile," for example), the wheel is definitely not being reinvented here, but it doesn't matter when the result is such a romp––pure, uncut brain candy. The pacing here is masterfully executed; the story literally hits the ground running and never lets up, tension ratcheted up and up, new information carefully doled out, each murder the same. Did I guess the ending? Yes, but the fact that I felt vindicated and pumped about it is a testament to what a great job Coates did here. ]]> 3.79 2023 Dead of Winter
author: Darcy Coates
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/04
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars.

And Then There None really is that bitch, and what Coates has done here is a great riff on that classic premise: a bunch of strangers, trapped in a cabin, a blizzard roaring outside, one of them a killer. The gore is over-the-top, suspension of belief is absolutely required, the author is definitely not American (the persistent use of the word "mobile," for example), the wheel is definitely not being reinvented here, but it doesn't matter when the result is such a romp––pure, uncut brain candy. The pacing here is masterfully executed; the story literally hits the ground running and never lets up, tension ratcheted up and up, new information carefully doled out, each murder the same. Did I guess the ending? Yes, but the fact that I felt vindicated and pumped about it is a testament to what a great job Coates did here.
]]> Beware the Woman 62366771 From New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott, an eerie and prescient novel about a family outing that takes a terrifying turn.

Honey, I just want you to have everything you ever wanted. That’s what Jacy’s mom always told her.

And Jacy felt like she finally did. Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her new husband Jed embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Doctor Ash, in Michigan’s far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive in the cozy cottage in the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Doctor Ash, if less so by his house manager, the enigmatic Mrs. Brandt.

But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly, vacation activities are scrapped, and all eyes are on Jacy’s condition. At the same time, whispers about Jed’s long-dead mother and complicated family history seem eerily to be impeding upon the present. As the days pass, Jacy begins to feel trapped in the cottage, her every move surveilled, her body under the looking glass. But are her fears founded or is it paranoia, or cabin fever, or—as is suggested to her—a stubborn refusal to take necessary precautions? The dense woods surrounding the cottage are full of dangers, but are the greater ones inside?]]> 320 Megan Abbott 0593084934 Michelle 2 girl) and Won't Talk About His Mother Who Died In Childbirth, and her even sketchier Doctor Father-in-Law; meanwhile, the housekeeper won't stop saying ominous things and force-feeding you hand-pies––mama, GET OUT. Look, we can talk about the depressing decline of Megan Abbott's craft on every level, including prose which used to be a gimme with her, and also character (the protagonist is Pregnant and there endeth her personality) and plot (.........no) and metaphor (mountain lion as allegory for female rage and defensive motherhood? Groundbreaking), but I'll choose instead to say the most disappointing part of all might have been how Abbott did nothing with any of this. Patriarchy is bad, wow []]> 3.22 2023 Beware the Woman
author: Megan Abbott
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/01
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves:
review:
Girl walks into an Upper Peninsula creep factory with her shady husband named Jed, who makes neon signs for a living (girl) and Won't Talk About His Mother Who Died In Childbirth, and her even sketchier Doctor Father-in-Law; meanwhile, the housekeeper won't stop saying ominous things and force-feeding you hand-pies––mama, GET OUT. Look, we can talk about the depressing decline of Megan Abbott's craft on every level, including prose which used to be a gimme with her, and also character (the protagonist is Pregnant and there endeth her personality) and plot (.........no) and metaphor (mountain lion as allegory for female rage and defensive motherhood? Groundbreaking), but I'll choose instead to say the most disappointing part of all might have been how Abbott did nothing with any of this. Patriarchy is bad, wow [
]]> Really Good, Actually 60877616 A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one woman’s messy search for joy and meaning in the wake of an unexpected breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica Heisey

Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée�.

Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there� sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.

Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call “happiness�. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.]]> 370 Monica Heisey 0063235412 Michelle 0
You know those tweets that show up on your fyp from female comedy writers and it’s a little dose of self-deprecating humor aiming for viral relatability and sometimes you give it a like or, high praise!, a retweet but you don’t follow them because this random single serving of their brand of comedy is enough for you? Well I’m here to tell you that tone and humor really doesn’t work longform as a novel. ]]> 3.14 2023 Really Good, Actually
author: Monica Heisey
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:
DNF @ 30%.

You know those tweets that show up on your fyp from female comedy writers and it’s a little dose of self-deprecating humor aiming for viral relatability and sometimes you give it a like or, high praise!, a retweet but you don’t follow them because this random single serving of their brand of comedy is enough for you? Well I’m here to tell you that tone and humor really doesn’t work longform as a novel.
]]> The Villa 60784641 From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins comes a deliciously wicked gothic suspense, set at an Italian villa with a dark history, for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album––and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred––and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge––and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.]]> 279 Rachel Hawkins 125028001X Michelle 2 3.59 2023 The Villa
author: Rachel Hawkins
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Happy Place 61718053
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.

Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends� hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week� in front of those who know you best?

A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.]]> 400 Emily Henry 0593441273 Michelle 2 3.95 2023 Happy Place
author: Emily Henry
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/22
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves:
review:
Me and my friends would’ve killed this crew with hammers I can tell you that much.
]]> The Happy Couple 63834978 An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart

Meet Celine and Luke--for all intents and purposes the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more inter­ested in piano than in domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest), as the only one with any emotional distance, observes her friends like ants in a colony. As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after--but does it lie at the end of an aisle?]]> 240 Naoise Dolan Michelle 3 Exciting Times a lot, so I hate to say how disappointed I was by this. I think this novel was ultimately a victim of cleverness out-maneuvering good storytelling. Dolan is often compared to Sally Rooney, the Irish and the female and the youth of it all I guess, but I feel like setting their work side-by-side really just demonstrates what Rooney is able to make effortless and engaging, and that's through utter faith in her characters. They feel like real people, going through real emotions, whereas here it just felt like paper cut-outs we were meant to laugh at. ]]> 3.34 2023 The Happy Couple
author: Naoise Dolan
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/15
date added: 2023/11/15
shelves:
review:
I was really looking forward to this, as I enjoyed Dolan's previous novel Exciting Times a lot, so I hate to say how disappointed I was by this. I think this novel was ultimately a victim of cleverness out-maneuvering good storytelling. Dolan is often compared to Sally Rooney, the Irish and the female and the youth of it all I guess, but I feel like setting their work side-by-side really just demonstrates what Rooney is able to make effortless and engaging, and that's through utter faith in her characters. They feel like real people, going through real emotions, whereas here it just felt like paper cut-outs we were meant to laugh at.
]]> Jane Austen at Home 31450766
Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy.

Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world’s favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.]]> 387 Lucy Worsley 125013160X Michelle 0 4.26 2017 Jane Austen at Home
author: Lucy Worsley
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/31
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves:
review:

]]> The Fraud 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.25 2023 The Fraud
author: Zadie Smith
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of the Most Precious Substance]]> 58945991 Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series.

A mysterious book that promises unlimited power and unrivaled sexual pleasure. A down-on-her-luck book dealer hoping for the sale of a lifetime. And a twist so shocking, no one will come out unscathed.

After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare book dealer. Until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written—if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it—if she can. Her search for the book takes her from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris, searching the dark corners of power where the world’s wealthiest people use black magic to fulfill their desires. Will Lily fulfill her own desires, and join them? Or will she lose it all searching for a ghost? The Book of the Most Precious Substance is an addictive erotic thriller about the lengths we’ll go to get what we need—and what we want.]]> 319 Sara Gran 0578947099 Michelle 3 3.53 2022 The Book of the Most Precious Substance
author: Sara Gran
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/06
date added: 2023/10/06
shelves:
review:
3.5. A horny little travelogue and food diary with a nasty little ending; a fun time!
]]> Penance 62898932 Do you know what happened already?
Did you know her?
Did you see it on the internet?
Did you listen to a podcast?
Did the hosts make jokes?

Did you see the pictures of the body?

Did you look for them?

It's been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.

That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

The only question is: how much of it is true?]]> 336 Eliza Clark 0571371795 Michelle 5 trenches, and I'm still spun out by how well, and horrifyingly accurately, she depicted that 2010s Tumblr culture. But beyond all that, as it dawned on me what Clark was doing here, not to be a complete cliche, I kept thinking of that famous Joan Didion line, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," and the truly nightmarish places such a thought can take us. ]]> 3.87 2023 Penance
author: Eliza Clark
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/01
date added: 2023/10/01
shelves:
review:
What a nasty nesting doll of a novel; I loved it. I'm always a sucker for a story centered around the "there's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls" theme (thank you, Megan Abbott), and this one not only delivered, but it did the rare thing where it actually achieved that verisimilitude it set out to capture. Eliza Clark has been in the online trenches, and I'm still spun out by how well, and horrifyingly accurately, she depicted that 2010s Tumblr culture. But beyond all that, as it dawned on me what Clark was doing here, not to be a complete cliche, I kept thinking of that famous Joan Didion line, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," and the truly nightmarish places such a thought can take us.
]]> Play It As It Lays 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Michelle 5 favorites 3.94 1970 Play It As It Lays
author: Joan Didion
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/26
date added: 2023/09/25
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Black Sheep 69704909
Nobody has a “normal� family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly...something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn’t return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.

Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper’s beloved cousin Rosie. It’s to be hosted at the family farm. Have they made an exception to the rule? It wouldn’t be the first time Vesper’s been given special treatment. Is the invite a sweet gesture? An olive branch? A trap? Doesn’t matter. Something inside her insists she go to the wedding. Even if it means returning to the toxic environment she escaped. Even if it means reuniting with her mother, Constance, a former horror film star and forever ice queen.

When Vesper’s homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she’s forced to reckon with her family’s beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.]]> 289 Rachel Harrison 0593545850 Michelle 2 Excessively silly. 3.57 2023 Black Sheep
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2023/09/24
shelves:
review:
Excessively silly.
]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

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

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Cranes Dance 12975068 I threw my neck out in the middle of Swan Lake last night.

So begins the tale of Kate Crane, a soloist in a celebrated New York City ballet company who is struggling to keep her place in a very demanding world. At every turn she is haunted by her close relationship with her younger sister, Gwen, a fellow company dancer whose career quickly surpassed Kate’s, but who has recently suffered a breakdown and returned home.

Alone for the first time in her life, Kate is anxious and full of guilt about the role she may have played in her sister’s collapse.Ěý As we follow her on an insider tour of rehearsals, performances, and partners onstage and off, she confronts the tangle of love, jealousy, pride, and obsession that are beginning to fracture her own sanity. Funny, dark, intimate, and unflinchingly honest, The Cranes Dance is a book that pulls back the curtains to reveal the private lives of dancers and explores the complicated bond between sisters.]]> 373 Meg Howrey 0307949826 Michelle 5 3.71 2012 The Cranes Dance
author: Meg Howrey
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/08
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves:
review:
Loved, loved, loved this. If I have any complaints, it's that it wasn't longer (the ending was a bit rushed), but the positives - the writing, the characters, BALLET!, SISTERS! - definitely outweigh that.
]]> You, Again 75665887 Can they stop hating each other long enough to fall in love?

A commitment-phobe and a hopeless romantic clash over and over again--until heartbreak and unexpected chemistry bring them together in this clever enemies-to-friends-to-lovers debut romance.

When Ari and Josh first meet, the wrong kind of sparks fly. They hate each other. Instantly.

A free-spirited, struggling comedian who likes to keep things casual, Ari sublets, takes gigs, and she never sleeps over after hooking up. Born-and-bred Manhattanite Josh has ambitious plans: Take the culinary world by storm, find The One, and make her breakfast in his spotless kitchen. They have absolutely nothing in common . . . except that they happen to be sleeping with the same woman.

Ari and Josh never expect their paths to cross again. But years later, as they're both reeling from ego-bruising breakups, a chance encounter leads to a surprising connection: friendship. Turns out, spending time with your former nemesis is fun when you're too sad to hate each other--and too sad for hate sex.

As friends-without-benefits, they find comfort in late-night Netflix binges, swiping through each other's online dating profiles, and bickering across boroughs. It's better than romance. Until one night, the unspoken boundaries of their platonic relationship begin to blur. . . .

With sharp observations and sizzling chemistry, You, Again explores the dynamics of co-ed friendship in this sparkling romantic comedy of modern love in all its forms.]]> 448 Kate Goldbeck 059344812X Michelle 3
Let's start with what I didn't like: like all romance novels I've read, I lost interest after they fucked lol. I do feel this is more on the book than on me (I love unresolved tension, baby!), namely because I feel like the novel fell into the usual tropey beats without doing anything interesting with them, whereas what came before did feel fresh and interesting, even if it was just essentially an updated When Harry Met Sally. The time skips didn't help, and by the end I wasn't really engaged anymore, and I hated the epilogue. I also hated every single pop culture reference in here, all of which felt dated even as I was reading; it's 2023, why are we still busting out Hamilton references? Why is that always the go-to in these books?!?! Tied to that: I don't think a worse fictional character exists than the dude character's sister. (There's a greater secondary character problem in play here, namely the clunky press the diversity buttons, get points gambit that rings terrifically false with the chef friend, but that's a longer discussion, and I haven't had coffee yet.)

And, last: the cover. We need a come to Jesus moment about these illustrated covers that have taken over the industry, because looking at this? My thought was, Baby's First Autumn Romance. I started reading expecting something twee as shit, so imagine my surprise when this turned out to be delightfully, confidently filthy and with such better written characters than I usually get out of this genre. Both characters were believably messy, and I found them charming for it. Goldbeck mines some fantastic tension out of their relationship, and for the first 200-odd pages, I was having a grand old time. ]]> 3.56 2023 You, Again
author: Kate Goldbeck
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves:
review:
My semi-annual pique of "I want to read some romance, goddamnit!" brought me here, and you know what? For once I had a lot of fun.

Let's start with what I didn't like: like all romance novels I've read, I lost interest after they fucked lol. I do feel this is more on the book than on me (I love unresolved tension, baby!), namely because I feel like the novel fell into the usual tropey beats without doing anything interesting with them, whereas what came before did feel fresh and interesting, even if it was just essentially an updated When Harry Met Sally. The time skips didn't help, and by the end I wasn't really engaged anymore, and I hated the epilogue. I also hated every single pop culture reference in here, all of which felt dated even as I was reading; it's 2023, why are we still busting out Hamilton references? Why is that always the go-to in these books?!?! Tied to that: I don't think a worse fictional character exists than the dude character's sister. (There's a greater secondary character problem in play here, namely the clunky press the diversity buttons, get points gambit that rings terrifically false with the chef friend, but that's a longer discussion, and I haven't had coffee yet.)

And, last: the cover. We need a come to Jesus moment about these illustrated covers that have taken over the industry, because looking at this? My thought was, Baby's First Autumn Romance. I started reading expecting something twee as shit, so imagine my surprise when this turned out to be delightfully, confidently filthy and with such better written characters than I usually get out of this genre. Both characters were believably messy, and I found them charming for it. Goldbeck mines some fantastic tension out of their relationship, and for the first 200-odd pages, I was having a grand old time.
]]> The Adults 9061509
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young woman’s struggle to grow up, The Adults lays bare—in perfect pitch—a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the same exact thing.]]> 307 Alison Espach 1439191859 Michelle 0 to-read 3.46 2011 The Adults
author: Alison Espach
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Absolutes 63022566 A moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric novel about a young woman's affair with an Italian aristocrat that leaves her spiraling in the face of love, danger, and obsession.

When Nora, an anxious and withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. They forge a sudden, powerful connection in a chairlift several hundred feet above the Alps, where Nicola, brimming with old-world wealth and secrets, eases Nora back from the verge of a panic attack. In an instant, Nora forgets the feelings she's been harboring for her host sister since arriving in Italy, and a sharper, more reckless feeling takes hold: blind trust and insatiable desire for Nicola.

Years later in New York, when Nicola becomes enmeshed in a covert, high-stakes business venture at the company where Nora works, the two begin an affair. But Nora is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when unrelenting currents of obsession, control, and revenge intensify their passion and entangle her in a secret plot to overthrow Nicola's corrupt father. Soon, she must decide for herself what makes a person truly evil and what she's willing to excuse for a chance at total intimacy.

Utterly seductive, fiercely intelligent, and achingly beautiful, The Absolutes is a revealing portrait of a relationship that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Molly Dektar has crafted a hypnotic, provocative, and profound study of desire.]]> 336 Molly Dektar 0063282704 Michelle 2 2.95 2023 The Absolutes
author: Molly Dektar
name: Michelle
average rating: 2.95
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2023/08/28
shelves:
review:
A weirdly dense book, it took me forever to get through this despite the fact it doesn't really say anything at all. A weak imitation of Annie Ernaux's work, it's a strange combination of over- and underwritten, resulting in zero tension, with some of the most pretentiously odd and unintentionally funniest dialogue I've read in a long time. I did really like the brief section in Turin; the writing about her time there felt terrifically realized as compared to the muddled slog that was the rest of the novel.
]]> Do Tell 62560783
Now on a new side of the entertainment business, Edie’s second act career grants her more control on the page than she ever commanded in front of the camera. But Edie quickly learns that publishing the secrets of those former colleagues she considers friends has repercussions. And when she finds herself in the middle of the trial of the decade, Edie is forced to make an impossible choice with the potential to ruin more than one life.

Debut novelist Lindsay Lynch brings the golden age of Hollywood to glittering life, from star-studded opening nights to backlot brawls, on-location Westerns to the Hollywood Canteen. Through Edie's wry observations, Lynch maps the intricate networks of power that manufacture the magic of the movies, and interrogates who actually gets to tell women's stories.]]> 352 Lindsay Lynch 0385549377 Michelle 2 3.16 2023 Do Tell
author: Lindsay Lynch
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/14
date added: 2023/08/14
shelves:
review:
Fanfic without a canon. There's a big ol' void at the center of this. Also, almost fascinating in how inert and passive both protagonist and narrative are. For example, there's a big court case that takes up at least half the novel and after the first day of proceedings the main character decides she won't return for the trial so it's just her seeking out transcripts??? Baffling. Equally baffling, the choice to write everything in short paragraph bursts with section dividers––even when staying in the same scene. Baffling!
]]> Commonwealth 28214468
#1 New York Times Bestseller | NBCC Award Finalist | New York Times Best Book of the Year | USA Today Best Book | TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection | Oprah Favorite Book | New York Magazine Best Book of The Year

The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families� lives.

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.]]> 352 Ann Patchett 0062491814 Michelle 4 3.97 2016 Commonwealth
author: Ann Patchett
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/06
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Little Monsters 62919906
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated—and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings� lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother’s goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.

As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he’s determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.

Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out—its Edenic lushness and its snakes.]]> 320 Adrienne Brodeur 1982198109 Michelle 3 3.63 2023 Little Monsters
author: Adrienne Brodeur
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Savages (Savages #2) 8008928
When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys' playmate and confidante. O's abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.]]> 302 Don Winslow 1439183368 Michelle 3 3.84 2010 Savages (Savages #2)
author: Don Winslow
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Good Fortune 63017304
When Elizabeth Chen’s ever-hustling realtor mother finally sells the beloved if derelict community center down the block, the new owners don’t look like typical New York City buyers. Brendan Lee and Darcy Wong are good Chinese boys with Hong Kong money. Clean-cut and charismatic, they say they are committed to cleaning up the neighborhood.

To Elizabeth, that only means one thing Darcy is looking to give the center an uptown makeover. Elizabeth is determined to fight for community over profit, even if it means confronting the arrogant, uptight man every chance she gets.

But where clever, cynical Elizabeth sees lemons, her mother sees lemonade. Eager to get Elizabeth and her other four daughters ahead in the world (and out of their crammed family apartment), Mrs. Chen takes every opportunity to keep her investors close. Closer than Elizabeth likes.

The more time they spend together, the more conflicted Elizabeth feels…until a shocking betrayal forces her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about love, trust, and the kind of person Darcy Wong really is.]]> 416 C.K. Chau 0063293765 Michelle 0 3.38 2023 Good Fortune
author: C.K. Chau
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/27
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves:
review:

]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Michelle 4 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/12
date added: 2023/07/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Filthy Animals 55801198 A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life

In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.

One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.]]> 288 Brandon Taylor 0525538917 Michelle 4
I lost my copy of this when I was halfway through it and I honestly forgot all about it until I stumbled upon it yesterday, which I suppose is a review in its own right.

There were some stories and passages in this that I found transcendently melancholy, capturing a real and understated truth about life or love or personhood, but there was just as much that I found bleakly cliched, straight off the writers workshop assembly line. ]]> 3.65 2021 Filthy Animals
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/03
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves:
review:
3.5

I lost my copy of this when I was halfway through it and I honestly forgot all about it until I stumbled upon it yesterday, which I suppose is a review in its own right.

There were some stories and passages in this that I found transcendently melancholy, capturing a real and understated truth about life or love or personhood, but there was just as much that I found bleakly cliched, straight off the writers workshop assembly line.
]]> Dava Shastri's Last Day 57653407 A dying billionaire matriarch leaks news of her death early so she can examine her legacy—a decision that horrifies her children and inadvertently exposes secrets she has spent a lifetime keeping.

Dava Shastri, one of the world's wealthiest women, has always lived with her sterling reputation in mind. A brain cancer diagnosis at the age of seventy, however, changes everything, and Dava decides to take her death—like all matters of her life—into her own hands.

Summoning her four adult children to her private island, she discloses shocking news: in addition to having a terminal illness, she has arranged for the news of her death to break early, so she can read her obituaries.

As someone who dedicated her life to the arts and the empowerment of women, Dava expects to read articles lauding her philanthropic work. Instead, her "death" reveals two devastating secrets, truths she thought she had buried forever.

And now the whole world knows, including her children.

In the time she has left, Dava must come to terms with the decisions that have led to this moment—and make peace with those closest to her before it's too late. Compassionately written and chock-full of humor and heart, this powerful novel examines public versus private legacy, the complexities of love, and the never-ending joys—and frustrations—of family.]]> 384 Kirthana Ramisetti 1538703866 Michelle 2 Malibu Rising and what I think of as The Chickenshit Scandal Paradox. By which I mean, the author has no interest in committing her beloved characters to anything actually dirty. In Malibu Rising, TJR describes the past parties thrown by her main characters, which includes what she considers to be the height of scandal in 1980s Malibu: skinny dipping and two models kissing. It’s laughably benign, like what a home-schooled preteen would describe as Scandalous. The same error is made here, where the greatest “scandals� that this author can think to assign to her billionaire main character are…�..these (I won’t spoil; they’re boring and deliberately rooted in making you sympathize with the dying billionaire; whither Rosebud), rather than, idk. Your usual billionaire financial crimes: hoarding of resources and wealth; tax evasion; exploitation; the dirty deeds and moral compromises that make that first billion. You don’t become a billionaire out of your good works or by following the U.S. tax code. But I digress. This book has no interest in being interesting.

It’s just. A billionaire diagnosed with terminal cancer decides to announce her death early so she can read all the obits and odes to her legacy is a premise that is ripe for satire! But this book is earnest all the way through, and that points to a bigger problem for me. I’ve read a couple novels this year about Rich Families� and all these families are alike in that their authors do not know how to contextualize them in the greater world or, maybe, they just refuse to. In a post-Succession media landscape I am sure we’ll see more Rich Families� stories (lord knows I hear the siren call myself to write one), but what the novels I’ve encountered so far fail to do is create empathy with these monsters while depicting them as exactly that: monstrous. Their effect on the world is monstrous, they should not exist.

And you know, if this book was sudsy, soapy fun maybe I wouldn’t care so much. But it isn’t. Maudlin storytelling written in mind-numbing, uninspired prose that feels the need to summarize neatly each scene you just trudged your way through and characters I couldn’t muster the energy to care about beyond the stereotype they were introduced as (respectively, gay; eldest daughter; in a throuple; male model? lol). Also…�..why was this set in 2044 if the author had no interest in doing anything at all with that????? 2044 looks like 2021 looks like 2002; baby, I’m baffled.

Beautiful cover though. ]]> 3.42 2021 Dava Shastri's Last Day
author: Kirthana Ramisetti
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves:
review:
This book made me think of Taylor Jenkins Reid (derogatory). Specifically, Malibu Rising and what I think of as The Chickenshit Scandal Paradox. By which I mean, the author has no interest in committing her beloved characters to anything actually dirty. In Malibu Rising, TJR describes the past parties thrown by her main characters, which includes what she considers to be the height of scandal in 1980s Malibu: skinny dipping and two models kissing. It’s laughably benign, like what a home-schooled preteen would describe as Scandalous. The same error is made here, where the greatest “scandals� that this author can think to assign to her billionaire main character are…�..these (I won’t spoil; they’re boring and deliberately rooted in making you sympathize with the dying billionaire; whither Rosebud), rather than, idk. Your usual billionaire financial crimes: hoarding of resources and wealth; tax evasion; exploitation; the dirty deeds and moral compromises that make that first billion. You don’t become a billionaire out of your good works or by following the U.S. tax code. But I digress. This book has no interest in being interesting.

It’s just. A billionaire diagnosed with terminal cancer decides to announce her death early so she can read all the obits and odes to her legacy is a premise that is ripe for satire! But this book is earnest all the way through, and that points to a bigger problem for me. I’ve read a couple novels this year about Rich Families� and all these families are alike in that their authors do not know how to contextualize them in the greater world or, maybe, they just refuse to. In a post-Succession media landscape I am sure we’ll see more Rich Families� stories (lord knows I hear the siren call myself to write one), but what the novels I’ve encountered so far fail to do is create empathy with these monsters while depicting them as exactly that: monstrous. Their effect on the world is monstrous, they should not exist.

And you know, if this book was sudsy, soapy fun maybe I wouldn’t care so much. But it isn’t. Maudlin storytelling written in mind-numbing, uninspired prose that feels the need to summarize neatly each scene you just trudged your way through and characters I couldn’t muster the energy to care about beyond the stereotype they were introduced as (respectively, gay; eldest daughter; in a throuple; male model? lol). Also…�..why was this set in 2044 if the author had no interest in doing anything at all with that????? 2044 looks like 2021 looks like 2002; baby, I’m baffled.

Beautiful cover though.
]]> The Social Climber 60666855
It’s the week before her wedding, and all of Eliza’s meticulous planning is about to pay off. She’s become the exact type of woman who would marry into the prominent, blue-blood Walker family � Ivy League credentials, a high-powered PR job, and a designer label wardrobe.

But as the big day approaches, secrets from Eliza’s past attending an Evangelical college start to throw her true motives into question. Who exactly is Eliza Bennett and what does she really want?

Written in a breakneck pace, capturing the glittering, privileged world of the one-percenters, THE SOCIAL CLIMBER is a gripping novel of one woman’s determination to seek justice at any cost.]]> 320 Amanda Pellegrino 077838702X Michelle 4 3.83 2023 The Social Climber
author: Amanda Pellegrino
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/19
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood]]> 62365904 An exposé of patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood, the grassroots reforms under way, and the labor and activist revolutions that recent scandals have ignited

It is never just One Bad Man.

Abuse and exploitation of workers is baked into the very foundations of the entertainment industry. To break the cycle and make change that sticks, it's important to stop looking at headline-making stories as individual events. Instead, one must look closely at the bigger picture, to see how abusers are created, fed, rewarded, allowed to persist, and, with the right tools, how they can be excised.

In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood's corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Lost, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm , and more. Interviews with actors and famous creatives like Evan Rachel Wood, Harold Perrineau, Damon Lindelof, and Orlando Jones abound. Ryan dismantles, one by one, the myths that the entertainment industry promotes about itself, which have allowed abusers to thrive and the industry to avoid accountability--myths about Hollywood as a meritocracy, what it takes to be creative, the value of human dignity, and more.

Weaving together insights from industry insiders, historical context, and pop-culture analysis, Burn It Down paints a groundbreaking and urgently necessary portrait of what's gone wrong in the entertainment world--and of how we can fix it.]]> 348 Maureen Ryan 0063269279 Michelle 0
I'm trying this new thing where I don't force myself to finish reading books I'm not enjoying (or worse! kinda sorta hate!). Which is disappointing, because after reading the excerpt about Lost from this book I was very excited to read the rest. What I came to realize was that that excerpt was very much edited to be published in Vanity Fair whereas the actual book reads as if no editor has ever seen a copy of this before. This is like reading someone's unedited substack archive; the occasional interesting insight, but it is all over the goddamn place, and Ryan seems to believe that if she doesn't hit on every. single. instance. of abuse within the history of Hollywood (dating all the way back to Clara Bow), then she has not done her job here. This, unfortunately, makes for a maddening reading experience as she does a surface level speed-run through way! too! much! stuff! (including The Muppets?) that just makes you wish she'd dig into the actual meat and not just recap stuff other people have already covered. idk; this also wasn't helped by the overly familiar, conversational, blogspeak tone. Hence, DNF.]]> 3.86 2023 Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood
author: Maureen Ryan
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/10
date added: 2023/06/10
shelves:
review:
DNF at 46%.

I'm trying this new thing where I don't force myself to finish reading books I'm not enjoying (or worse! kinda sorta hate!). Which is disappointing, because after reading the excerpt about Lost from this book I was very excited to read the rest. What I came to realize was that that excerpt was very much edited to be published in Vanity Fair whereas the actual book reads as if no editor has ever seen a copy of this before. This is like reading someone's unedited substack archive; the occasional interesting insight, but it is all over the goddamn place, and Ryan seems to believe that if she doesn't hit on every. single. instance. of abuse within the history of Hollywood (dating all the way back to Clara Bow), then she has not done her job here. This, unfortunately, makes for a maddening reading experience as she does a surface level speed-run through way! too! much! stuff! (including The Muppets?) that just makes you wish she'd dig into the actual meat and not just recap stuff other people have already covered. idk; this also wasn't helped by the overly familiar, conversational, blogspeak tone. Hence, DNF.
]]> The Zone of Interest: A novel 22842067 Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.

The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.
Ěý
The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are?

Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, Martin Amis’s unforgettable new novel excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 322 Martin Amis 0385353502 Michelle 0 3.93 2014 The Zone of Interest: A novel
author: Martin Amis
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2023/06/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Bad Summer People 62027635 A whip-smart, propulsive debut about infidelity, backstabbing, and murderous intrigue, set against an exclusive summer haven on Fire Island
None of them would claim to be a particularly good person. But who among them is actually capable of murder?
Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker rule the town of Salcombe, Fire Island every summer. They hold sway on the beach and the tennis court, and are adept at manipulating people to get what they want. Their husbands, Sam and Jason, have summered together on the island since childhood, despite lifelong grudges and numerous secrets. Their one single friend, Rachel Woolf, is looking to meet her match, whether he's the tennis pro-or someone else's husband. But even with plenty to gossip about, this season starts out as quietly as any other.
Until a body is discovered, face down off the side of the boardwalk.
Stylish, subversive and darkly comedic, this is a story of what's lurking under the surface of picture-perfect lives in a place where everyone has something to hide.]]> 263 Emma Rosenblum Michelle 2 technically fit the brief for what I wanted: something light and frothy to read while I laid out in the sun and had a beverage or two, but it also left me wanting a lot more. Did this get monumentally silly (and repetitive; good lord this wasn't Rashomon, I didn't need the same yacht club non-events recapped from half a dozen points of view) by the end? Yes. Did this read like a diet East Coast version of Big Little Lies, missing any of that story's bigger themes and characterization? Yup. Did I love the forty-two year old horse girl-coded tennis obsessive spinster gossip? With all my heart. ]]> 3.64 2023 Bad Summer People
author: Emma Rosenblum
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/06/04
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves:
review:
This technically fit the brief for what I wanted: something light and frothy to read while I laid out in the sun and had a beverage or two, but it also left me wanting a lot more. Did this get monumentally silly (and repetitive; good lord this wasn't Rashomon, I didn't need the same yacht club non-events recapped from half a dozen points of view) by the end? Yes. Did this read like a diet East Coast version of Big Little Lies, missing any of that story's bigger themes and characterization? Yup. Did I love the forty-two year old horse girl-coded tennis obsessive spinster gossip? With all my heart.
]]> The Force of Such Beauty 61118631 After a failed attempt at escape, the princess of a tiny kingdom begins to reevaluate her life.

Caroline, a former marathon runner who dropped out of school at fourteen to pursue an Olympic medal, was the perfect candidate for a tiara: shapely, disciplined, accustomed to public attention, and utterly uneducated.

After she meets Finn, the handsome prince of a small European kingdom, her fate is sealed. With a collar of pearls locked around her throat and a rope of diamonds leashing her to a balcony, Caroline uses her once-powerful body to smile, wave, and produce children with perfect grace.

But once she begins to open her eyes to the world around her—and examine her own reflection—Caroline discovers that she may have entered a bargain that cannot be undone.

Barbara Bourland’s stunning third novel is her most ambitious and most imaginative book to date. Inspired by accounts of real-life princesses who yearned to escape, and set in a grotesque and gaudy prerecession 2000s Europe, The Force of Such Beauty is a heart-wrenching and compulsively readable testament to the way in which real-life power structures around the world ultimately rest on the subjugation of women’s bodies.]]> 400 Barbara Bourland Michelle 3 Princess Diaries), and despite some significant lag in the pacing in the middle, I found it compulsively readable. But! I think if literally any other character had been developed as well as the main character, this would have been a slam dunk for me. Everyone in her life read as a walking red flag, and with just a little nuance for the royal family and/or the handlers, Bourland would have had me in the palm of her hand. ]]> 4.11 2022 The Force of Such Beauty
author: Barbara Bourland
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/26
date added: 2023/05/27
shelves:
review:
3.5? I enjoyed this a lot; the narrator, and the development of her story, worked fantastically for me, even if this did sometimes read like well-done YA (almost like a nightmare mirrorverse Princess Diaries), and despite some significant lag in the pacing in the middle, I found it compulsively readable. But! I think if literally any other character had been developed as well as the main character, this would have been a slam dunk for me. Everyone in her life read as a walking red flag, and with just a little nuance for the royal family and/or the handlers, Bourland would have had me in the palm of her hand.
]]> The Guest 62067054
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to the end of the holidays moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998634 Michelle 2 The Girls. And yet! Hollow and tedious, an unending cycle of the main character scamming her way into bathrooms and swimming pools, each iteration dully the same. Cline is able to conjure a pronounced feeling of anxiety and dread throughout this, but with nothing else, nothing real to anchor that, idk. Should've been a short story.]]> 3.24 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/21
date added: 2023/05/21
shelves:
review:
On a craft and prose level, this is an improvement on The Girls. And yet! Hollow and tedious, an unending cycle of the main character scamming her way into bathrooms and swimming pools, each iteration dully the same. Cline is able to conjure a pronounced feeling of anxiety and dread throughout this, but with nothing else, nothing real to anchor that, idk. Should've been a short story.
]]> A Place of Greater Safety 101921 749 Hilary Mantel 0312426399 Michelle 4 3.98 1992 A Place of Greater Safety
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2018/04/05
date added: 2023/05/20
shelves:
review:
I have no idea how to properly talk about this book. It's messy, it's overlong, it presupposes the reader knows a whole ton about the French Revolution and is needlessly confusing as a result of that. But it also demonstrates the incredible acumen Hilary Mantel has for taking history and making it read as vital and immediate and I want to use the word "modern" but I'm not sure it encompasses all I mean. There's an incredible feeling throughout this entire book, but especially the last 100-odd pages, that as a reader you are facing down a train and there's no way to stop it because all these events have already occurred and all these people are already doomed. It's a magic trick that she made this as suspenseful as it is. I was legitimately surprised by how invested I had become in these people and how absolutely emotionally drained and wrecked I felt by the final pages. What a ride.
]]> <![CDATA[Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy]]> 61105800
In 2016, the fate of Paramount Global—the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire that includes Paramount, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, and Simon & Schuster—hung precariously in the balance. Its founder and head, ninety-three-year-old Sumner M. Redstone, was facing a very public lawsuit brought by a former romantic companion, Manuela Herzer—a lawsuit that placed Sumner’s deteriorating health and questionable judgment under a harsh light.
Ěý
As one of the last in a long line of all-powerful media moguls, Sumner had been a relentlessly demanding boss, and an even more demanding father. When his daughter, Shari, took control of her father’s business, she faced the hostility of boards and management who for years had heard Sumner disparage her. Les Moonves, the popular CEO of CBS, felt particularly threatened and schemed with his allies on the board to strip Shari of power. But while he publicly battled Shari, news began to leak that Moonves had been involved in multiple instances of sexual misconduct, and he began working behind the scenes to try to make the stories disappear.
Ěý
Unscripted is an explosive and unvarnished look at the usually secret inner workings of two public companies, their boards of directors, and a wealthy, dysfunctional family in the throes of seismic changes, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. Through the microcosm of Paramount, whose once victorious business model of cable fees and ticket sales is crumbling under the assault of technological advances, and whose workplace is undergoing radical change in the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and a distaste for the old guard, Stewart and Abrams lay bare the battle for power at any price—and the carnage that ensued.]]> 416 James B. Stewart 1984879421 Michelle 3
I had thoroughly enjoyed DisneyWar by Stewart, but this was missing both that rich sense of characterization and that same propulsive drive, where building to a shareholder meeting had the same energy as the climax of a thriller. Here, by the time Moonves's ouster actually happens, it's anticlimactic and wearying in the same way all stories about these men are, which probably speaks to a problem bigger than this book. ]]> 3.72 2023 Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy
author: James B. Stewart
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/02
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
review:
Infuriating, disgusting, as are all stories about billionaires (and their hangers-on) and their disregard for anything but money (and, I suppose, their legacy), but I feel like this book suffered from a lack of tighter focus? For example, I found the focus on Pilgrim an odd and unnecessary choice and don't think it added anything to the already clearly demonstrated elder abuse Redstone was subject to and instead just read Hollywood gossip-y, which pulled focus from all the boardroom politicking.

I had thoroughly enjoyed DisneyWar by Stewart, but this was missing both that rich sense of characterization and that same propulsive drive, where building to a shareholder meeting had the same energy as the climax of a thriller. Here, by the time Moonves's ouster actually happens, it's anticlimactic and wearying in the same way all stories about these men are, which probably speaks to a problem bigger than this book.
]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Michelle 3 3.53 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/13
date added: 2023/04/30
shelves:
review:
3.5???? idk, I’m torn on this one. There were parts of this I absolutely loved and parts I found exhilarating and moving, but then there was just as much I found utterly interminable (the emails; I’m talking about the emails). I think if Rooney just let herself write her relationship stories without feeling the need to defend them, and herself, I would’ve enjoyed this a lot more.
]]> Book Lovers 58690308 One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....

Nora Stephens� life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters� trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.]]> 377 Emily Henry 0593334833 Michelle 2 not the book for me. Whether it's romanticizing a trip to Target or fetishizing books to the point that I began to wonder if these two wanted to bone a paperback more than each other or lines of dialogue like "I love everything about you." / "Even my Peloton?" or the invertebrate perfect and perfectly hunky male hero or love interests addressing each other by their last names while smirking mid-(incredibly mid) banter, I just..........can't. Reading this was a lot like listening to Taylor Swift for me: I guess I understand the appeal, but it's completely lost on me. ]]> 4.09 2022 Book Lovers
author: Emily Henry
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/04/28
date added: 2023/04/28
shelves:
review:
I gave in to curiosity and, since my mom had a copy laying around, gave this a whirl, and, oof. Baby, this is not the book for me. Whether it's romanticizing a trip to Target or fetishizing books to the point that I began to wonder if these two wanted to bone a paperback more than each other or lines of dialogue like "I love everything about you." / "Even my Peloton?" or the invertebrate perfect and perfectly hunky male hero or love interests addressing each other by their last names while smirking mid-(incredibly mid) banter, I just..........can't. Reading this was a lot like listening to Taylor Swift for me: I guess I understand the appeal, but it's completely lost on me.
]]> Games and Rituals 63892606 The beloved author of Early Morning Riser ("The funniest novel of the year." --The Washington Post) brings us eleven glittering stories of love--friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts--in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.

The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous and edgy to tenderly touching.

In "Damascus," a mother fears her teenage son is making the same youthful mistakes she did, only to realize that he is wiser than she had understood. In "Twist and Shout," Ericka's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity when she is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea... But would North Korea help South Korea move?")

From one of today's most accomplished bard's of modern life--of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, being late for the wrong job, but being loved by the right people--a fresh and satisfying work of glorious humour and immense kindness.]]> 223 Katherine Heiny 0525659528 Michelle 3 3.99 2023 Games and Rituals
author: Katherine Heiny
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/26
date added: 2023/04/26
shelves:
review:
I found this collection to be a little disappointing, a little slight, especially as compared to how much I had loved Heiny’s other short story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow (which I might just have to reread now).
]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty]]> 43868109 The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.]]> 535 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385545681 Michelle 4 "The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions."

Anything I have to say about the Sackler family would probably get me put on a government watchlist, we can start with that. This is a devastating read; Keefe has written a staggering (and compulsively readable) saga of corporate greed and venality, the chase for bigger profits at the expense of literally everything else. It's the ultimate American tragedy.

I’m from the Ohio Rust Belt and just about every family I know has been wrecked and rocked by the opioid epidemic this one family (and its enablers) unleashed, including my own. To learn how every step of the way the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma evaded any accountability, any measure of safety or responsibility, and then evaded even an ounce of retribution too––enraging is too small a word.]]> 4.54 2021 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/24
date added: 2023/04/24
shelves:
review:
"The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions."


Anything I have to say about the Sackler family would probably get me put on a government watchlist, we can start with that. This is a devastating read; Keefe has written a staggering (and compulsively readable) saga of corporate greed and venality, the chase for bigger profits at the expense of literally everything else. It's the ultimate American tragedy.

I’m from the Ohio Rust Belt and just about every family I know has been wrecked and rocked by the opioid epidemic this one family (and its enablers) unleashed, including my own. To learn how every step of the way the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma evaded any accountability, any measure of safety or responsibility, and then evaded even an ounce of retribution too––enraging is too small a word.
]]> DisneyWar 8218432 The dramatic inside story of the downfall of Michael Eisner—Disney Chairman and CEO—and the scandals that drove America’s best-known entertainment company to civil war.“When You Wish Upon a Star,� “Whistle While You Work,� “The Happiest Place on Earth”—these are lyrics indelibly linked to Disney, one of the most admired and best-known companies in the world. So when Roy Disney, chairman of Walt Disney Animation and nephew of founder Walt Disney, abruptly resigned in November 2003 and declared war on chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner, he sent shock waves through the entertainment industry, corporate boardrooms, theme parks, and living rooms around the world—everywhere Disney does business and its products are cherished.Drawing on unprecedented access to both Eisner and Roy Disney, current and former Disney executives and board members, as well as thousands of pages of never-before-seen letters, memos, transcripts, and other documents, James B. Stewart gets to the bottom of mysteries that have enveloped Disney for What really caused the rupture with studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a man who once regarded Eisner as a father but who became his fiercest rival? How could Eisner have so misjudged Michael Ovitz, a man who was not only “the most powerful man in Hollywood� but also his friend, whom he appointed as Disney president and immediately wanted to fire? What caused the break between Eisner and Pixar chairman Steve Jobs, and why did Pixar abruptly abandon its partnership with Disney? Why did Eisner so mistrust Roy Disney that he assigned Disney company executives to spy on him? How did Eisner control the Disney board for so long, and what really happened in the fateful board meeting in September 2004, when Eisner played his last cards? DisneyWar is an enthralling tale of one of America’s most powerful media and entertainment companies, the people who control it, and those trying to overthrow them. It tells a story that—in its sudden twists, vivid, larger-than-life characters, and thrilling climax—might itself have been the subject of a Disney classic—except that it’s all true.]]> 620 James B. Stewart 0743283902 Michelle 4 4.32 2005 DisneyWar
author: James B. Stewart
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/14
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves:
review:
[me responding to my friends and family when they inquire how I'm doing after learning I've been sick with covid all week]: ... and THEN Eisner ousts Roy Disney from the board, Roy DISNEY, and he thinks he's going to retain power??? Not in the court of public opinion. And, then, with the shareholder meeting coming up ...
]]> Romantic Comedy 62628727 A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for "The Night Owls," the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the "Danny Horst Rule," poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.]]> 309 Curtis Sittenfeld 0399590943 Michelle 1 no point. And it’s a hard thing to read about something you once loved a lot and read such a…�.leadened and flat depiction of it. You could say the biggest problem here is Sittenfeld’s nonexistent sense of humor. It could be the tin-earned dialogue, where every line from every character reads like a Twitter polemic. It could be the lack of characterization, the chemistry, that a third of his novel is a charmless email exchange that would probably be interesting solely to the participants in it (and even then, credulity strains), that the central relationship is so empty. There’s no grit here! No edge! How are you going to write about comedy if you have everyone speaking in therapy and social media political speak?!?!

Do you remember that TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? Aaron Sorkin’s stunningly unfunny, self-serious paean to smug rich white liberalism and sketch comedy? This is that in book form. And it pains me to have to hand anything to Aaron Sorkin, but at least he wrote some actual characters.

I’m going to go rewatch 30 Rock now.]]> 3.60 2023 Romantic Comedy
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/04/08
date added: 2023/04/08
shelves:
review:
I should start by saying, though I don't watch it much anymore, for a good chunk of my life I was very much an SNL girlie. I watched every episode, had favorite sketches I rewatched all the time; I gobbled up the oral histories and the autobiographies and the interviews and any and everything I could get my hands on about what it was like to work at SNL. I was in deep, baby. So maybe the first (interminable) third of this novel is interesting to anyone unfamiliar with the inner-workings of SNL, but I sincerely doubt it. Not even rising to the level of find-and-replace real names fanfiction, Sittenfeld's stripped anything interesting about comedy writing and SNL to the point it's so soulless it almost reads like an employee manual. And, fine, sure, Sittenfeld wanted to play around in this particular sandbox; I don't blame her, for a long time I did too. But the problem is that she brings nothing to it. There's no life, no spark. no humor, no point. And it’s a hard thing to read about something you once loved a lot and read such a…�.leadened and flat depiction of it. You could say the biggest problem here is Sittenfeld’s nonexistent sense of humor. It could be the tin-earned dialogue, where every line from every character reads like a Twitter polemic. It could be the lack of characterization, the chemistry, that a third of his novel is a charmless email exchange that would probably be interesting solely to the participants in it (and even then, credulity strains), that the central relationship is so empty. There’s no grit here! No edge! How are you going to write about comedy if you have everyone speaking in therapy and social media political speak?!?!

Do you remember that TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? Aaron Sorkin’s stunningly unfunny, self-serious paean to smug rich white liberalism and sketch comedy? This is that in book form. And it pains me to have to hand anything to Aaron Sorkin, but at least he wrote some actual characters.

I’m going to go rewatch 30 Rock now.
]]> My Last Innocent Year 61362722 An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.]]> 295 Daisy Alpert Florin 125085704X Michelle 4 3.98 2023 My Last Innocent Year
author: Daisy Alpert Florin
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/01
date added: 2023/04/02
shelves:
review:
3.5 rounded up. I actually really liked this, and thought this was going to be a five-star in the first half of the novel. The prose is great, and the main character is written in such a compelling, genuine way where after the book ended I wanted to spend more time with her. The depiction of college and that state-of-flux of senior year was similarly excellent, and familiar, like forcing yourself to revisit someone you thought you'd left behind long ago. And while I struggled with some of the overwrought heavy-handedness as the novel went along (the key metaphor; the constant Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky references; the subplot with the divorcing professors; the main character's kleptomania because she couldn't help taking what wasn't hers, while, you know, fucking a married man), I think my biggest complaint is that Florin didn't burrow in deeper, and messier, with the themes of consent and power she set up. [spoilers removed]I found that fascinating, and was ultimately disappointed Florin didn't continue working with that thread, braiding the issues of power and consent with desire and eroticism in that subtly insidious way.
]]> The Flames 62602660
Amid an opulent society living under the shadow of war are four muses, women whose bodies were shown in intimate detail, depicted by the charming yet controversial artist Egon Schiele. Adele, his passionate and fierce admirer; Gertrude, his sister who survived their blighted childhood but is possessive, single-minded, and jealous; his mistress Vally, a poor young woman from a bad background but with steel at her core; and the two, very different, Harms sisters, Edith and Adele, both of whom vie to become Schiele’s wife.

Over the course of little more than a decade, the four women risk everything—their reputations, their most precious relationships, and their sanity and souls—as they try to hold on to the man they adore. As World War I throws their lives off course forever, and the Spanish influenza pandemic ravages Europe, threatening everyone in its path, one question remains: Will any of them emerge unscathed from their relationship with this man? Sophie Haydock’s The Flames reimagines the intertwining lives of these women: four wild, blazing hearts longing to be known. In an elegant Bohemian city like 1900s Vienna, everything seems possible. But just as a flame has the power to mesmerize, it can also destroy.]]> 464 Sophie Haydock 1647009197 Michelle 0 to-read 3.95 2022 The Flames
author: Sophie Haydock
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Pineapple Street 57738656 Pineapple Street is a smart escapist novel that sparkles with wit. It’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love.]]> 304 Jenny Jackson Michelle 1 3.81 2023 Pineapple Street
author: Jenny Jackson
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/03/29
date added: 2023/03/29
shelves:
review:
A terrifically uninspired portrait of wealth, depicted in equally uninspired (or worse) prose. It's 2023; I'm not feeling an ounce of sympathy for the 1% unless you brutally, and artfully, skewer them first, thanks.
]]> Birnam Wood 63853404
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.

But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 426 Eleanor Catton 0374718016 Michelle 4 the writing and find myself compulsively reading on, a literal page-turner! Catton is a deft hand with plotting (and with satire, but that's another story and it's Sunday morning and I'm not clever enough to get into that lol), with making each choice and decision and act a character makes consequential in almost a marble run sort of way: once they kick something into action, either deliberately or unawares, gravity and forces beyond that character's control (including other characters and their actions) are going to do the rest. Because I am me, my absolute favorite part of this novel was the deliciously complicated relationship between Shelley and Mira, and what happens when you add a maybe psychopathic billionaire and his money into their mix. Genuinely, brilliant plotting aside, I would have happily have read a book solely about that and found myself, by the (unfortunately rather rushed and girl, what?) ending, wishing if not exactly for that then a few more scenes, a bit more interior development of their denouement. Still, I hugely looking forward to rereading this, which I have a feeling I will be doing very soon. ]]> 3.83 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/25
date added: 2023/03/26
shelves:
review:
It has been a very long time (too long!) since I read a book where I felt like I could sink into the prose like a warm bath or under a cozy blanket and get lost in the world and the story and the characters and the writing and find myself compulsively reading on, a literal page-turner! Catton is a deft hand with plotting (and with satire, but that's another story and it's Sunday morning and I'm not clever enough to get into that lol), with making each choice and decision and act a character makes consequential in almost a marble run sort of way: once they kick something into action, either deliberately or unawares, gravity and forces beyond that character's control (including other characters and their actions) are going to do the rest. Because I am me, my absolute favorite part of this novel was the deliciously complicated relationship between Shelley and Mira, and what happens when you add a maybe psychopathic billionaire and his money into their mix. Genuinely, brilliant plotting aside, I would have happily have read a book solely about that and found myself, by the (unfortunately rather rushed and girl, what?) ending, wishing if not exactly for that then a few more scenes, a bit more interior development of their denouement. Still, I hugely looking forward to rereading this, which I have a feeling I will be doing very soon.
]]> My Nemesis 74853910 While Tessa's husband Milton enjoys Charlie's company, Charlie's wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah's traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa's martini-fueled declaration that Wah is 'an insult to womankind.' As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether.
An exercise in empathy, an exploration of betrayal and a charged story of the thrill of a shared connection - and the perils of feminine rivalry - My Nemesis is a brilliantly dramatic and captivating story from a hugely talented writer.]]> 159 Charmaine Craig 1804710237 Michelle 4 3.20 2023 My Nemesis
author: Charmaine Craig
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/11
date added: 2023/03/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the �80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Michelle 3 4.39 2017 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2017/10/14
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n� roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 Michelle 3 4.20 2019 Daisy Jones & The Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/03/07
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves:
review:
This was a blast. I especially loved the oral history format and how each character was an unreliable narrator telling their contradictory (and corroborating) stories, and I LOVED that Reid included lyrics in the back of the book. The parts of the book devoted to writing, recording and then touring the AURORA album were easily my favorite; I would have read thousands of pages, both in the oral history format or prose, of that. Which brings me to the only drawback of this format: you do feel like you're missing out on the story a bit, and more than a bit on characterization. Beyond that, if I had any real complaint, I think it would be the idealized, saintly Perfect Wife character who stretched my credulity, but even that wasn't enough to damper my enjoyment of this book. It left me wanting to spend the weekend rewatching Almost Famous for the millionth time and dig up a good Fleetwood Mac biography lol.
]]> I Have Some Questions For You 61053833
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 448 Rebecca Makkai 0593490150 Michelle 3 all the toppings because, again, individually they're good, together they'll be awesome? And you take that first spoonful and it is just pure sugary inedible slop? I wouldn't go that far with this book, but oh buddy. Me Too, true crime, racism, podcasts, Boarding School Dark Academia� Lite, Twitter, performance artists, DIVORCE, cancer, student theater, eating disorders, Kurt Cobain, unending courtroom drama, MORMONS: this book has everything, and the kitchen sink. It also suffered a lot as a result.

Though when I (finally, mercifully) got to the acknowledgements and read, "I have lived for twenty-one years on the campus of the same boarding school that I attended as a day student in the 1990s," all the questions I had about this book for Rebecca Makkai suddenly were answered.

(And, lastly, any book that has a line of dialogue that reads, "You really haven't been on Twitter, have you. Oh, Jesus. So, I think I've been, ah––I got canceled, as they say.", is not getting higher than three stars from me.) (Writers stop writing about Twitter, for the love of god, please.)]]> 3.72 2023 I Have Some Questions For You
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/28
date added: 2023/02/28
shelves:
review:
You know when you're a kid and you go to a frozen yogurt place and you combine yogurt flavors that should not be mixed simply off the logic that individually they're good, so together they must be awesome? And then you layer on all the toppings because, again, individually they're good, together they'll be awesome? And you take that first spoonful and it is just pure sugary inedible slop? I wouldn't go that far with this book, but oh buddy. Me Too, true crime, racism, podcasts, Boarding School Dark Academia� Lite, Twitter, performance artists, DIVORCE, cancer, student theater, eating disorders, Kurt Cobain, unending courtroom drama, MORMONS: this book has everything, and the kitchen sink. It also suffered a lot as a result.

Though when I (finally, mercifully) got to the acknowledgements and read, "I have lived for twenty-one years on the campus of the same boarding school that I attended as a day student in the 1990s," all the questions I had about this book for Rebecca Makkai suddenly were answered.

(And, lastly, any book that has a line of dialogue that reads, "You really haven't been on Twitter, have you. Oh, Jesus. So, I think I've been, ah––I got canceled, as they say.", is not getting higher than three stars from me.) (Writers stop writing about Twitter, for the love of god, please.)
]]> Big Swiss 50361265 A brilliantly original and funny novel about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist who falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions. When they accidentally meet in real life, an explosive affair ensues.

Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house, built in 1737, is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss, since she’s tall, stoic, and originally from Switzerland. Greta is fascinated by Big Swiss’s refreshing attitude toward trauma. They both have dark histories, but Big Swiss chooses to remain unattached to her suffering while Greta continues to be tortured by her past.

One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice at the dog park. In a panic, she introduces herself with a fake name and they quickly become enmeshed. Although Big Swiss is unaware of Greta’s true identity, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship�

Bold, outlandish, and filled with irresistible characters, Big Swiss is both a love story and also a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, one-of-a-kind voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 333 Jen Beagin 1982153105 Michelle 4 3.62 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2023/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> Sign Here 59358268 A darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping debut novel about a guy who works in Hell (literally) and is on the cusp of a big promotion if only he can get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sell their soul.

Peyote Trip has a pretty good gig in the deals department on the fifth floor of Hell. Sure, none of the pens work, the coffee machine has been out of order for a century, and the only drink on offer is Jägermeister, but Pey has a plan—and all he needs is one last member of the Harrison family to sell their soul.

When the Harrisons retreat to the family lake house for the summer, with their daughter Mickey’s precocious new friend, Ruth, in tow, the opportunity Pey has waited a millennium for might finally be in his grasp. And with the help of his charismatic coworker Calamity, he sets a plan in motion.

But things aren’t always as they seem, on Earth or in Hell. And as old secrets and new dangers scrape away at the Harrisons� shiny surface, revealing the darkness beneath, everyone must face the consequences of their choices.]]> 416 Claudia Lux 0593545761 Michelle 1 actually reading the book? I've been sold a bill of goods, baby. ]]> 3.78 2022 Sign Here
author: Claudia Lux
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2023/02/08
date added: 2023/02/08
shelves:
review:
................reading the summary for this book and then actually reading the book? I've been sold a bill of goods, baby.
]]> The Writing Retreat 61273863
Alex has all but given up on her dreams of becoming a published author when she receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: attend an exclusive, month-long writing retreat at the estate of feminist horror writer Roza Vallo. Even the knowledge that Wren, her former best friend and current rival, is attending doesn’t dampen her excitement.

But when the attendees arrive, Roza drops a bombshell—they must all complete an entire novel from scratch during the next month, and the author of the best one will receive a life-changing seven-figure publishing deal. Determined to win this seemingly impossible contest, Alex buckles down and tries to ignore the strange happenings at the estate, including Roza’s erratic behavior, Wren’s cruel mind games, and the alleged haunting of the mansion itself. But when one of the writers vanishes during a snowstorm, Alex realizes that something very sinister is afoot. With the clock running out, she must discover the truth—or suffer the same fate.]]> 313 Julia Bartz 1982199458 Michelle 1 3.41 2023 The Writing Retreat
author: Julia Bartz
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/02/05
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves:
review:
Luridly, hysterically stupid, from the increasingly deranged plot to its depicting of the publishing industry to the bafflingly awful novel-in-a-novel we're meant to believe is Genius�; the one bright spot was how unhinged it was for awhile on the nasty psychosexual former gal pals front. That said, I clipped through it in a single afternoon, the ultimate image of the Benoit Blanc meme: "it makes no damn sense // compels me though."
]]> <![CDATA[Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)]]> 39325105 Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to Gideon the Ninth, turns a galaxy inside out as one necromancer struggles to survive the wreckage of herself aboard the Emperor's haunted space station.

She answered the Emperor's call.

She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.

In victory, her world has turned to ash.

After rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman's shoulders.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath � but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her.

Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor's Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?]]> 512 Tamsyn Muir 1250313228 Michelle 5 4.30 2020 Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)
author: Tamsyn Muir
name: Michelle
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/31
date added: 2023/01/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Aesthetica 60291217 In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past—and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media.

At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,� peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica�, a procedure will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife.

But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke� masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her life-threatening surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.

Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,� delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #metoo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.]]> 264 Allie Rowbottom 1641294000 Michelle 0 currently-reading 3.33 2022 Aesthetica
author: Allie Rowbottom
name: Michelle
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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