Wouter's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 09:48:52 -0700 60 Wouter's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Three Days in June 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life,ĚýThree Days in JuneĚýis a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Wouter 0 currently-reading 3.61 2025 Three Days in June
author: Anne Tyler
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Wouter 4 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/01
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]]> The Burgess Boys 15823461
With a rare combination of brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose, and remarkable insight into character, Elizabeth Strout has brought to life two deeply human protagonists whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Tender, tough-minded, loving, and deeply illuminating about the ties that bind us to family and home, The Burgess Boys is Elizabeth Strout's newest and perhaps most astonishing work of literary art.]]> 320 Elizabeth Strout 1400067685 Wouter 3 3.58 2013 The Burgess Boys
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sins of the Fathers (Matthew Scudder, #1)]]> 39507 The pretty young prostitute is dead. Her alleged murderer—a minister's son—hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl's father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.

]]> 182 Lawrence Block 0752834525 Wouter 0 to-read 3.87 1976 The Sins of the Fathers (Matthew Scudder, #1)
author: Lawrence Block
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> Beethoven's Piano Sonatas 2661342 24 lectures on 12 cassettes 0 Robert Greenberg 1598030124 Wouter 0 currently-reading 4.47 2005 Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
author: Robert Greenberg
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 Wouter 5 3.82 2023 Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Levant Trilogy (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 625230 576 Olivia Manning 0141186453 Wouter 0 to-read 4.28 1980 The Levant Trilogy (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: Olivia Manning
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> The Balkan Trilogy 465697 1033 Olivia Manning 0099427486 Wouter 0 to-read 4.18 1960 The Balkan Trilogy
author: Olivia Manning
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> The History of Sound 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Wouter 0 to-read 4.36 2024 The History of Sound
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> 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 Wouter 3 3.50 2024 The Coin
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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]]> Woo Woo 209457798 A thrilling and eccentric novel about what it means to make art as a woman, and about the powerful forces of voyeurism, power, obsession, and online performanceWoo Woo follows Sabine, a conceptual artist on the verge of a photo exhibition she hopes will be pivotal, as she plunges deeper into her neuroses and seeks validation in relationships—with her frustratingly rational chef husband, her horde of devoted Gen Z TikTok followers, and even a mysterious, potentially violent stalker. Accompanying her throughout are Sabine’s strange alter egos, from hyperrealistic puppets of her as a baby to the ghost of conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann, who shows up with inscrutable yet sage life advice. Ella Baxter approaches the desire to see and be seen that defines both the creative and romantic act with humor, empathy, and a good dose of wildness, driving Sabine to an surreal and compelling climax that forces her—and us—to reconsider what it means to be an artist and a partner.]]> 272 Ella Baxter 1646222555 Wouter 4 3.14 2024 Woo Woo
author: Ella Baxter
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/13
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]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Wouter 5 3.87 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/12
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]]> The Secret Hours 123727738
But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.

Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.

TheĚýSecretĚýHours is a dazzling entry point into Mick Herron’s body of work, a standalone spy thriller that is at once unnerving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny. It is also the breathtakingĚýsecretĚýhistory that Slough House fans have been waiting for.]]> 384 Mick Herron 164129521X Wouter 0 currently-reading 4.08 2023 The Secret Hours
author: Mick Herron
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> I Have Some Questions for You 61053829
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.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 Wouter 5 3.57 2023 I Have Some Questions for You
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/11
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]]> Stag Dance 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Wouter 4 4.04 2025 Stag Dance
author: Torrey Peters
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/10
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]]> Around the Bend 132089141 With little more than personal grit and an antique aircraft, Cutter organizes an independent flying service on the Persian Gulf. He sees opportunities everywhere, also dangers.

"In Cutter's growth from provincial conservative to worldly entrepreneur, Shute brings us a fine portrayal of a man willing to accept pain and danger in his search for personal growth." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

]]> 0 Nevil Shute Wouter 0 to-read 4.00 1951 Around the Bend
author: Nevil Shute
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)]]> 19161852
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.]]> 468 N.K. Jemisin Wouter 3 4.29 2015 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> The Feast 3409731
A Cornish cliff collapses on top of a seaside resort hotel, squashing everybody but those lucky enough to be away on a picnic. The story tells why some were spared and some were not...

The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth.

Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.]]> 308 Margaret Kennedy 0718208110 Wouter 0 to-read 3.95 1949 The Feast
author: Margaret Kennedy
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins Wouter 2 4.34 2008 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Wouter 3 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> Luminous 214151232 A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.]]> 391 Silvia Park 1668021668 Wouter 0 to-read 3.87 2025 Luminous
author: Silvia Park
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> Mildred Pierce 101205
Out of these elements, Cain created a novel (later made into a film noir classic) of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence—and a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.]]> 288 James M. Cain 0752852043 Wouter 0 to-read 3.91 1941 Mildred Pierce
author: James M. Cain
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1941
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919]]> 1088564
Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly consolidated New York grew exponentially. The city exploded into the air, with skyscrapers jostling for prominence, and dove deep into the bedrock where massive underground networks of subways, water pipes, and electrical conduits sprawled beneath the city to serve a surging population of New Yorkers from all walks of life. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential.

Wallace's new book matches its predecessor in pure page-turning appeal and takes America's greatest city to new heights.]]> 1182 Mike Wallace 0195116356 Wouter 0 to-read 4.33 2017 Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
author: Mike Wallace
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898]]> 217329
In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city.

The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.]]> 1383 Edwin G. Burrows 0195140494 Wouter 0 to-read 4.32 1998 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
author: Edwin G. Burrows
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> My Ăntonia 17150 219 Willa Cather 1583485090 Wouter 0 to-read 3.82 1918 My Ăntonia
author: Willa Cather
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Wouter 0 to-read 3.93 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
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]]> Bronshtein in the Bronx 212249370 A vivid, visceral portrait of ten weeks in the life of Leon Trotsky, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Company

On Saturday, January 13, 1917, an ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia, his companion and two sons in tow. He lives and would die for a worker’s revolution, at any cost—but is he ready to become an American? In the weeks leading up to the February Revolution that will see Lenin’s Bolsheviks in power, Bronshtein haunts the streets, newspaper offices, and socialist gathering places of New York City, wrestling with the difficult questions of his personal revolutionary ideology, his place in his own family, his relationship to Lenin, and, above all, his conscience.

Master of espionage fiction Robert Littell brings to fictional life the ten weeks the world-famous revolutionary spent in the Bronx in this extraordinary meditation on purpose, passion, and the price of progress.]]> 208 Robert Littell 1641296860 Wouter 0 to-read 3.74 2025 Bronshtein in the Bronx
author: Robert Littell
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made]]> 199531990 A “connected� account of how the Mob has worked with America’s Commander in Chiefs and have influenced the presidency for nearly a century.

Gangsters and presidents have long captured the American imagination, but how much does the underworld actually affect presidential power? How deep are their “connections�? As Eric Dezenhall reveals in this eye-opening history, in some instances, one couldn’t have functioned without the other. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Joseph R. Biden, the mob has done presidential dirty work, including attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, harass America’s enemies, and put our chief executives in office.

Wiseguys and the White House documents when mobsters and presidents have traded favors—and double-crossed each other, including:

� The deal cut with Lucky Luciano to protect the waterfront during World War II.
How the Chicago Outfit (and Frank Sinatra) got one Kennedy elected, only to be pursued by another.
� How LBJ and the FBI used a mob hitman to hunt down the killers of Civil Rights activists in Mississippi
� Reagan’s association with Lew Wasserman, the powerful and influential Hollywood mogul
� Trump's blatant ties to construction and gambling cartels
Biden’s early links to “the Irishman� Frank Sheeran, the labor union official and enforcer for Jimmy Hoffa and Russell Bufalino.
� And more

Combining exhaustive research, including newly released government records and the private recollections of leading gangsters, Wiseguys and the White House offers insight into the myths about the power in America and the drive for recognition and respectability that unites consiglieri and commanders-in-chief alike.]]> 368 Eric Dezenhall 0063390612 Wouter 0 to-read 3.68 2025 Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made
author: Eric Dezenhall
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> T.R.: The Last Romantic 76789
Lauded as "a rip-roaring life" ( Wall Street Journal ), TR is a magisterial biography of Theodore Roosevelt by bestselling author H.W. Brands. In his time, there was no more popular national figure than Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that made him so popular, or even his status as a bonafide war hero. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family loved America and Americans.

And yet, according to Brands, if we look at the private Roosevelt without blinders, we see a man whose great public strengths hid enormous personal deficiencies; he was uncompromising, self-involved, and a highly imperfect brother, husband, and father.

Beautifully written, and powerfully moved by its subject, TR is the classic biography of one of America's greatest and most complex leaders.]]> 928 H.W. Brands 0465069592 Wouter 0 currently-reading 4.17 1997 T.R.: The Last Romantic
author: H.W. Brands
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.]]> 16121 ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýBorn the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýRockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýWhile providing abundant new evidence of Rockefeller's misdeeds, Chernow discards the stereotype of the cold-blooded monster to sketch an unforgettably human portrait of a quirky, eccentric original. A devout Baptist and temperance advocate, Rockefeller gave money more generously--his chosen philanthropies included the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, and what is today Rockefeller University--than anyone before him. Titan presents a finely nuanced portrait of a fascinating, complex man, synthesizing his public and private lives and disclosing numerous family scandals, tragedies, and misfortunes that have never before come to light.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýJohn D. Rockefeller's story captures a pivotal moment in American history, documenting the dramatic post-Civil War shift from small business to the rise of giant corporations that irrevocably transformed the nation. With cameos by Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Jung, J. Pierpont Morgan, William James, Henry Clay Frick, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers, Titan turns Rockefeller's life into a vivid tapestry of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is Ron Chernow's signal triumph that he narrates this monumental saga with all the sweep, drama, and insight that this giant subject deserves.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 832 Ron Chernow 1400077303 Wouter 5 4.15 1998 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
author: Ron Chernow
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> What We Can Know 227560104 2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.



2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.

Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
]]> Ian McEwan 1529959217 Wouter 0 to-read 4.17 What We Can Know
author: Ian McEwan
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.17
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> The Girls Who Grew Big 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here isĚýan astonishing new novel aboutĚýthe joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 Wouter 0 to-read 4.20 2025 The Girls Who Grew Big
author: Leila Mottley
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> Audition 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Wouter 0 to-read 3.56 2025 Audition
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
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]]> Rabbit Moon 217182494 A family drama set in Shanghai, where a fractured American family faces its complicated past

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: Their twenty-two-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit-and-run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks� marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,� they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is as it seems.]]> 288 Jennifer Haigh 0316577138 Wouter 0 to-read 3.81 Rabbit Moon
author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.81
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]]> The Names 217245618 In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 336 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Wouter 0 to-read 4.35 2025 The Names
author: Florence Knapp
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> The Winter Soldier 37946436
But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone.]]> 323 Daniel Mason 0316477605 Wouter 0 to-read 3.89 2018 The Winter Soldier
author: Daniel Mason
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Centennial 133430 is an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people: Lame Beaver, the Arapaho chieftain and warrior, and his Comanche and Pawnee enemies; Levi Zendt, fleeing with his child bride from the Amish country; the cowboy, Jim Lloyd, who falls in love with a wealthy and cultured Englishwoman, Charlotte Seccombe. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the destiny of the legendary West—and the entire country.]]> 1056 James A. Michener Wouter 0 to-read 4.25 1974 Centennial
author: James A. Michener
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> Rapture 199458188
So begins the life of John the a matchless scholar and scribe of Fulda, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge of the old and new languages of Europe, theology and Church law - and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful (and deadly) currency.

And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known - and loved.]]> 234 Emily Maguire Wouter 0 to-read 3.95 2024 Rapture
author: Emily Maguire
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> The Land in Winter 209160325
Eric and Irene and Bill and Rita. Two young couples living next to each other, the first in a beautiful cottage - suitable for a newly appointed local doctor - the second in a rundown, perennially under-heated farm. Despite their apparent differences, the two women (both pregnant) strike an easy friendship - a connection that comes as a respite from the surprising tediousness of married life, with its unfulfilled expectations, growing resentments and the ghosts of a recent past.

But as one of the coldest winters on record grips England in a never-ending frost and as the country is enveloped in a thick, soft, unmoving layer of snow, the two couples find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. And without the small distractions of everyday existence, suddenly old tensions and shocking new discoveries threaten to change the course of their lives forever.

A masterful, page-turning examination of the minutiae of life, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling - proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of Britain's most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart. ]]> 365 Andrew Miller 1529354315 Wouter 0 to-read 3.92 2024 The Land in Winter
author: Andrew Miller
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> A Simple Plan 21727 417 Scott Smith 0307279952 Wouter 2 3.91 1993 A Simple Plan
author: Scott Smith
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1993
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> The Heart in Winter 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Wouter 4 3.79 2024 The Heart in Winter
author: Kevin Barry
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Butcher 197516630 From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,� as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation. As he begins to establish himself as a pioneer of nineteenth-century surgery, Weir’s ambition is fueled by his obsessive fascination with a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit, who becomes not only Weir’s primary experimental subject, but also the agent of his destruction.

Narrated by Silas Weir’s eldest son, who has repudiated his father’s brutal legacy, Butcher is a unique blend of fiction and fact, a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche conjoined, in its startling conclusion, with unexpected romance. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has written a spellbinding novel confirming her position as one of our celebrated American visionaries of the imagination.]]> 352 Joyce Carol Oates 0593537777 Wouter 2 3.75 2024 Butcher
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> <![CDATA[1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus]]> 39020 In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

]]> 563 Charles C. Mann 1400032059 Wouter 0 to-read 4.05 2005 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
author: Charles C. Mann
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> Lamb in His Bosom 267478
Caroline Miller was fascinated by the other Old South—not the romantic inhabitants of Gone With the Wind, but rather the poor people of the south Georgia backwoods, who never owned a slave or planned to fight a war. The story of Cean and Lonzo, a young couple who begin their married lives two decades before the Civil War, Lamb in His Bosom is a fascinating account of social customs and material realities among settlers of the Georgia frontier. At the same time, Lamb in His Bosom transcends regional history as Miller's quietly lyrical prose style pays poignant tribute to a woman's life lived close to nature—the nature outside her and the nature within.]]> 357 Caroline Miller 156145074X Wouter 0 to-read 3.83 1933 Lamb in His Bosom
author: Caroline Miller
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1933
rating: 0
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]]> The Eighth Day 126630 Thornton Wilder’s renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder’s unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material.

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim’s wife and children.

At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a “suspenseful and deeply moving� (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic.]]> 512 Thornton Wilder 0060088915 Wouter 0 to-read 3.99 1967 The Eighth Day
author: Thornton Wilder
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (McNulty Family)]]> 137446
Sebastian Barry's latest novel,Ěý Days Without End , is now available.Ěý
For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict. Unable to find work in the depressed times after World War I, Eneas joins the British-led police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary � a decision that alters the course of his life. Branded a traitor by Irish nationalists and pursued by IRA hitmen, Eneas is forced to flee his homeland, his family, and Viv, the woman he loves. His wandering terminates on the Isle of Dogs, a haven for sailors, where a lifetime of loss is redeemed by a final act of generosity. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is the story of a lost man and a compelling saga that illuminates Ireland's complex history.]]> 336 Sebastian Barry 0140280189 Wouter 0 to-read 3.92 1998 The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (McNulty Family)
author: Sebastian Barry
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> Fall; or, Dodge in Hell 35429993 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Seveneves, Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon returns with a wildly inventive and entertaining science fiction thriller�Paradise Lost by way of Phillip K. Dick—that unfolds in the near future, in parallel worlds.

In his youth, Richard “Dodge� Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.

One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.

In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls.

But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem . . .

Fall, or Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.

]]> 896 Neal Stephenson 0062458736 Wouter 0 abandoned 3.44 2019 Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: abandoned
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]]> The Passenger Seat 205482443
In a small town in North America, two boys, or men, embark on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness with little more than canned food and secondhand camping gear—and the rifle they buy on their way out of town for reasons neither seems able to articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents� houses and their peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the grim future that awaits them in their nowhere town, the less their actions—and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play—are bound by the usual constraints. When Adam decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the outcome is irreversible, and leads them even further down a road from which there’s no turning back.

A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness, The Passenger Seat introduces Vijay Khurana as an powerful new voice in fiction.]]> 240 Vijay Khurana 1771966300 Wouter 0 to-read 3.84 2025 The Passenger Seat
author: Vijay Khurana
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
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]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Wouter 0 to-read 3.65 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> Universality 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Wouter 0 to-read 3.43 2025 Universality
author: Natasha Brown
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> We Pretty Pieces of Flesh 211003695 An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the �90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.� But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace � the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.]]> 336 Colwill Brown 1250342880 Wouter 0 to-read 4.16 2025 We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
author: Colwill Brown
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The Boyhood of Cain 217005303 A searing novel of love and betrayal as a young boy comes of age in the heart of England, from an exquisite new voice.

In a small village in England, in the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, a young boy is growing up. Daniel is highly intelligent but little understood by his family, and so a secret passion burns inside him—for love, for certainty, and for recognition. His father is a man of grand gestures but few practical skills, and his beautiful mother is attentive but compromised by her own unhappiness and fading ideals.ĚýĚý

When Daniel’s father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, the family is pulled beneath the undertow of his whims, stumbling into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. The arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom Daniel worships with a confused intensity, is his sole solace. Before long, both boys fall under the spell of a charismatic art teacher, setting Daniel on a perilous course that could lead to the betrayal of all he loves. Ěý

Tender, brutal, and enthralling, The Boyhood of Cain is a remarkable portrait of a young boy caught between mother and father, between self and desire, and between obedience and freedom. It evokes the passions and private wounds of youth and plumbs the turning points in our lives that make us who we are.]]> 208 Michael Amherst 0593718526 Wouter 0 to-read 3.42 2025 The Boyhood of Cain
author: Michael Amherst
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> Idle Grounds 214151881 On a New England morning in the late 1980s, a group of young cousins wander deep into the woods on their family’s property, drawn in by uncanny visions and the disappearance of one of their own—but the farther they go, the stranger their surroundings become.

Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with bickering about decades-old crises, the children decide they must set out to investigate themselves—to the rickety chicken coop, the barn and its two troublesome horses, and into the woods that once comprised their late grandmother’s property. The more the children search, and the deeper they walk, the more threatening the woods become and the more lost they are, caught between their aunt’s home in the present day, their parents� childhood home just through the trees, and the memory of the house their grandmother grew up in. Soon, what began as a quest for answers gives way to a journey that undermines everything they’ve been told about who they are, where they came from, and what they deserve.

Disquieting and delightful, Idle Grounds is a rich exploration of the interior lives of children and a gripping meditation on birthright, decline, and weight of family history. A fable of the distortions of privilege and the impossibility of keeping secrets hidden, this is a novel about straying from home—only to come back unraveled, unsettled, and irrevocably changed.]]> 208 Krystelle Bamford 1668070456 Wouter 0 to-read 3.30 2025 Idle Grounds
author: Krystelle Bamford
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The City Changes Its Face 217587183 'Eimear McBride is that old-fashioned thing, a genius.' - Anne Enright
'One of our major novelists.' - Guardian
'McBride's themes and language prove her to be fearless, and her voice is utterly compelling and unique.' - Sinead Gleeson

From the winner of the Women's Prize - an intense story of a passionate love affair arriving at its first test.

A rainy Camden night, December 1996. 20-year-old Eily and 40-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what's gone wrong. Is it Stephen's reconnection with his long-lost teenage daughter, Grace? Or that he's a well-known actor while Eily's still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he's just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily's youth has led her into a mistake she doesn't know how to fix?

Intimate, experiential, and immersive, this is the story of what happens when it's love beyond question, but trouble comes along anyway.]]> 320 Eimear McBride 0571384218 Wouter 0 to-read 3.73 2025 The City Changes Its Face
author: Eimear McBride
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The Boy from the Sea 216948295 An Observer Best Debut of 2025

An ordinary town.
An extraordinary boy.
The heart-warming, life-affirming debut story of a baby found on a beach and the fisherman who adopts him.

'Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' - Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan by Ambrose Bonnar, the fisherman who adopts him, the baby captivates the town and the boy he grows to be will captivate them still � no one can quite fathom Brendan Bonnar.

For Christine, Ambrose’s wife, Brendan brings both love and worry. For Declan, their son, his new brother’s arrival is the start of a life-long rivalry. And though Ambrose brings Brendan into his home out of love, it is a decision that will fracture his family and force this man � more comfortable at sea than on land � to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Told over two decades, Garrett Carr's The Boy from the Sea is a novel about a restless boy trying to find his place in the world and a family fighting to hold itself together. It is a story of ordinary lives made extraordinary, a drama about a community who can’t help but look to the boy from the sea for answers as they face the storm of a rapidly changing world.

]]> 330 Garrett Carr 1035044544 Wouter 0 to-read 4.09 2025 The Boy from the Sea
author: Garrett Carr
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> Saraswati 219308160 As a holy river returns, seven lives change course in this masterpiece debut for fans of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith and Eleanor Catton

Centuries ago, the holy river Saraswati flowed through what is now Punjab. Many dismiss this as myth, but when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother's funeral, he finds water in the dried-up well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river as an act of Hindu nationalist pride.

The river changes the course of Satnam's life, and those of six others. As legends and histories resurface, the distant relatives - from a Canadian eco-saboteur to a Mauritian pest exterminator to a Bollywood stunt double - are brought together in a rapidly changing India. Ambitious, moving and brimming with folklore, Saraswati is a tour de force from one of Britain's most feted young writers.]]> Gurnaik Johal 1782839216 Wouter 0 to-read 3.90 2025 Saraswati
author: Gurnaik Johal
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> Beartooth 206549834 Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival.

In an aging timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration and the medical bills from their father’s fatal illness and the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is... different, more instinctual, deeply attuned to the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a proposition and agree to attempt a heist of natural resources from Yellowstone, a federal crime. Beartooth is a fast-paced tale set in the grandeur of the American West.]]> 256 Callan Wink 1954118023 Wouter 0 to-read 3.69 2025 Beartooth
author: Callan Wink
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> Night Watch 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Wouter 4 3.55 2023 Night Watch
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> Grant 34237826
Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had been dismal, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War, he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in the Civil War, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the Battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee after a series of unbelievably bloody battles in Virginia. Along the way Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. His military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff. All the while Grant himself remained more or less above reproach. But, more importantly, he never failed to seek freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him 'the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race." After his presidency, he was again brought low by a trusted colleague, this time a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, but he resuscitated his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

With his famous lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as "nothing heroic... and yet the greatest hero." His probing portrait of Grant's lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America's greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of America's finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.]]> 1074 Ron Chernow 159420487X Wouter 5 4.46 2017 Grant
author: Ron Chernow
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/02
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]]> Adam Bede 20563 The story of a beautiful country girl's seduction by the local squire and its bitter, tragic sequel is an old and familiar one which George Eliot invests with peculiar and haunting power.

A bestseller from the moment of publication, Adam Bede, although on one level a rich and loving re-creation of a small community shaken to its core, is more than a charming, faultlessly evoked pastoral. However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays,it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.']]> 624 George Eliot 0375759018 Wouter 0 to-read 3.81 1859 Adam Bede
author: George Eliot
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1859
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> Shy Creatures 199531966
Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen's home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

Shy Creatures is a life-affirming novel about all the different ways we can be confined, how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience, the joy of freedom and the transformative power of kindness.]]> 400 Clare Chambers 0063258226 Wouter 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Shy Creatures
author: Clare Chambers
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?]]> 133938338
From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. The play transpires over one long, boozy night, laying bare the lies, compromises, and scalding love that have sustained a middle-aged couple through decades of marriage. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn’t be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.

Then, Hollywood took a colossal gamble on Albee’s sophisticated play―and won. Costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the sensational 1966 film minted first-time director Mike Nichols as industry royalty and won five Oscars. How this scorching play became a movie classic―surviving censorship attempts, its creators� inexperience, and its stars� own tumultuous marriage―is one of the most riveting stories in all of cinema.

Now, acclaimed author Philip Gefter tells that story in full for the first time, tracing Woolf from its hushed origins in Greenwich Village’s bohemian enclave, through its tormented production process, to its explosion onto screens across America and a permanent place in the canon of cinematic marriages. This deliciously entertaining book explores how two couples―one fictional, one all too real―forced a nation to confront its most deeply held myths about relationships, sex, family, and, against all odds, love.]]> 368 Philip Gefter 1635579627 Wouter 0 to-read 4.00 Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
author: Philip Gefter
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.00
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Ălvaro Enrigue 059354479X Wouter 0 to-read 3.75 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Ălvaro Enrigue
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> Whale Fall 195888522 A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.]]> 224 Elizabeth O'Connor 0593700910 Wouter 0 to-read 3.80 2024 Whale Fall
author: Elizabeth O'Connor
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Honjin Murders (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, #1)]]> 52706058 One of Japan's greatest classic murder mysteries, introducing their best loved detective, translated into English for the first time.

In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour - it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions around the village.

Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi household are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music. Death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. Soon, amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is on the scene to investigate what will become a legendary murder case, but can this scruffy sleuth solve a seemingly impossible crime?]]> 189 Seishi Yokomizo 1782275002 Wouter 0 to-read 3.63 1946 The Honjin Murders (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, #1)
author: Seishi Yokomizo
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Quiche of Death (Agatha Raisin, #1)]]> 139176 246 M.C. Beaton 0312939167 Wouter 0 to-read 3.77 1992 The Quiche of Death (Agatha Raisin, #1)
author: M.C. Beaton
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned]]> 84557 Easy Rawlins fans might initially find themselves disappointed by the absence of a mystery to unravel. But it's a gripping inner drama that unfolds over the pages of these stories, as Socrates comes to grips with the chaos, poverty and violence around him. He tries to get and keep a job delivering groceries; takes in a young street kid named Darryl, who has his own murder to hide; and helps drive out the neighbourhood crack dealer. Throughout, Mosley captures the rhythms of Watts life in prose both lyrical and hard-edged, resulting in a haunting look at a life bounded by lust, violence, fear and a ruthlessly unsentimental moral vision.

]]> 208 Walter Mosley 1852427027 Wouter 0 to-read 4.17 1997 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
author: Walter Mosley
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge, #1)]]> 35464016 A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that’s as hard-boiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. MacDonald.

Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska—he’s tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the moneymaking scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear.

Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to the Hudson Valley, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn’t one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track her will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.

At turns brutally shocking and darkly funny, heartbreaking and cautiously hopeful, Blood Standard is both a high-tension crime novel and the story of a man given a second chance—confronting the parts of his past he will never escape, and embracing the parts that will shape his future.]]> 321 Laird Barron 0735212872 Wouter 0 to-read 4.09 2018 Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge, #1)
author: Laird Barron
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Death and the Conjuror (A Spector Locked-Room Mystery, #1)]]> 59580637 A magician-turned-sleuth in pre-war London solves three impossible crimes.

In 1930s London, celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees is discovered dead in his locked study, and there seems to be no way that a killer could have escaped unseen. There are no clues, no witnesses, and no evidence of the murder weapon. Stumped by the confounding scene, the Scotland Yard detective on the case calls on retired stage-magician-turned-part-time-sleuth Joseph Spector. Who better to make sense of the impossible than one who traffics in illusions?

Spector has a knack for explaining the inexplicable, but even he finds that there is more to this mystery than meets the eye. As he and the Inspector interview the colorful cast of suspects among the psychiatrist's patients and household, they uncover no shortage of dark secrets—or motives for murder. When the investigation dovetails into that of an apparently impossible theft, the detectives consider the possibility that the two transgressions are related. And when a second murder occurs, this time in an impenetrable elevator, they realize that the crime wave will become even deadlier unless they can catch the culprit soon.]]> 256 Tom Mead 1613163185 Wouter 0 to-read 3.45 2022 Death and the Conjuror (A Spector Locked-Room Mystery, #1)
author: Tom Mead
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> My Cousin Rachel 18869970 349 Daphne du Maurier 0316252964 Wouter 0 to-read 4.02 1951 My Cousin Rachel
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Wouter 5 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
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]]> Isola 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 Wouter 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Isola
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story�

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Wouter 3 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August]]> 35066358 417 Claire North Wouter 0 to-read 4.03 2014 The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
author: Claire North
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Let Us March On 199634737 336 Shara Moon 0063213427 Wouter 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Let Us March On
author: Shara Moon
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Every Man a King (King Oliver, #2)]]> 61280556
This linear assignment becomes a winding quest to uncover the extent of Quiller’s dealings, to understand Ferris� skin in the game, and to get to the bottom of who is working for whom. Even with the help of bodyguard and mercenary Oliya Ruez—no regular girl Friday—the machine King’s up against proves relentless and unsparing. As King gets closer to exposing the truth, he and his loved ones barrel towards grave danger.

Mosley once again proves himself a "master of craft and narrative" (National Book Foundation) in this carefully plotted mystery that is at once a classic caper, a family saga and an examination of fealty, pride and how deep debt can go.]]> 324 Walter Mosley 0316460214 Wouter 0 to-read 3.68 2023 Every Man a King (King Oliver, #2)
author: Walter Mosley
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Down the River Unto the Sea (King Oliver, #1)]]> 35173689 From trailblazing novelist Walter Mosley: a former NYPD cop once imprisoned for a crime he did not commit must solve two cases: that of a man wrongly condemned to die, and his own.

Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island.

A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of--and why.

Running in parallel with King's own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Joined by Melquarth Frost, a brilliant sociopath, our hero must beat dirty cops and dirtier bankers, craven lawyers, and above all keep his daughter far from the underworld in which he works. All the while, two lives hang in the balance: King's client's, and King's own.]]> 336 Walter Mosley 0316509647 Wouter 0 to-read 3.58 2018 Down the River Unto the Sea (King Oliver, #1)
author: Walter Mosley
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right (King Oliver, #3)]]> 212924044 In the latest from “mystery master� Walter Mosley, a family member’s terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his tracking down his long-lost father, and meanwhile, a new case pits King’s professional responsibility against his own moral code. (TheWashington Post)
Ěý
Praise for the novels of Walter
Ěý
“A master of the genre…Mosley’s writing is so rich, and his characters are not like anyone else’s, anywhere. It’s noir with a social conscience, noir with its thinking cap on� revelatory.� � Tracy Clark, Washington Post
Ěý
"Skitters across the spectrum between orthodox and radical like a polygraph needle wired to a nervy accomplice. . . deliciously gritty noir."�Daniel Nieh , New York Times Book Review
Ěý
“The evocative prose and astute observations about human nature, race relations and family bonds that have distinguished Mosley's writing for some 30 years."�Paula Woods , Los Angeles Times
Ěý
“As knotty as the plot can get, the book is consistently lifted by the intelligence of its characters…Mosley is in top form as a social Absolute poverty, muses his protagonist, is being â€the experience of being slowly murdered by a state of being.â€� Mosley's reportorial eye is equally sharp in making details count…”â€� Kirkus Reviews
Ěý
“a modern master of the noir form, ... Mosley knows exactly how to craft a mystery that keeps you at the edge of your seat all the while forcing you to reckon with sinister forces at the heart of American society." � Dwyer Murphy , CrimeReads
Ěý
“Mosley is a master of craft and narrative, and through his incredibly vibrant and diverse body of work, our literary heritage has truly been enriched.”�National Book Foundation
Ěý
"Few mystery writers can examine issues of race—how it divides and binds people—as clearly and unflinchingly as Walter Mosley."�Oline Cogdill, Associated Press ]]> 336 Walter Mosley 0316573264 Wouter 0 to-read 3.96 Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right (King Oliver, #3)
author: Walter Mosley
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 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 Wouter 3 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/08
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]]> The God of the Woods 199700434 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide.

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances.

Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet, The God of the Woods is a story of inheritance and second chances, the tensions between a family and a community, and a history that will not let any of them go.]]> 478 Liz Moore 0593418913 Wouter 0 to-read 4.09 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.09
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]]> Question 7 179455076
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.]]> 280 Richard Flanagan 1761343467 Wouter 0 to-read 4.19 2023 Question 7
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> Mark Twain 219158332 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Before he wasĚýMarkĚýTwain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the youngĚýTwainĚýwent west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.

In this richly nuanced portrait ofĚýMarkĚýTwain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize,ĚýTwainĚýand his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life wasĚýmarked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing onĚýTwain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death,ĚýTwain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.]]> 1196 Ron Chernow 0525561730 Wouter 0 to-read 4.80 2025 Mark Twain
author: Ron Chernow
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, MieczysĹ‚aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Wouter 0 to-read 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Wouter 0 to-read 3.92 2024 Our Evenings
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Wouter 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Comfort Me with Apples 56179382
It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?]]> 103 Catherynne M. Valente 1250816211 Wouter 1 3.57 2021 Comfort Me with Apples
author: Catherynne M. Valente
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/28
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]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Wouter 5 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln]]> 2199 Winner of the Lincoln Prize

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.

Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.]]> 916 Doris Kearns Goodwin Wouter 0 to-read 4.27 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> Leonardo da Vinci 34684622 600 Walter Isaacson 1501139150 Wouter 0 to-read 4.19 2017 Leonardo da Vinci
author: Walter Isaacson
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cruelest Month (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #3)]]> 2277378
It's spring in the tiny, forgotten village; buds are on the trees and the first flowers are struggling through the newly thawed earth. But not everything is meant to return to life. . .

When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a séance at the Old Hadley House, they are hoping to rid the town of its evil—until one of their party dies of fright. Was this a natural death, or was the victim somehow helped along?

Brilliant, compassionate Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is called to investigate, in a case that will force him to face his own ghosts as well as those of a seemingly idyllic town where relationships are far more dangerous than they seem.]]> 310 Louise Penny 0755328949 Wouter 2 4.10 2007 The Cruelest Month (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #3)
author: Louise Penny
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
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Bad writing, stereotypical characters, ridiculous plotlines... Still, its silliness is kind of addictive. I love Three Pines and I'll return to it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wall-Paper (Penguin Little Black Classics, #42)]]> 24874307 'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.'

Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do.

Also contains The Rocking-Chair and Old Water.]]> 54 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0141397411 Wouter 4 4.07 1892 The Yellow Wall-Paper (Penguin Little Black Classics, #42)
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1892
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Janus Stone (Ruth Galloway, #2)]]> 42554253 ASIN moved from less recent edition

It’s been only a few months since archaeologist Ruth Galloway found herself entangled in a missing persons case, barely escaping with her life. But when construction workers demolishing a large old house in Norwich uncover the bones of a child beneath a doorway—minus its skull—Ruth is once again called upon to investigate. Is it a Roman-era ritual sacrifice, or is the killer closer at hand?
Ruth and Detective Harry Nelson would like to find out—and fast. When they realize the house was once a children’s home, they track down the Catholic priest who served as its operator. Father Hennessey reports that two children did go missing from the home forty years before—a boy and a girl. They were never found. When carbon dating proves that the child’s bones predate the home and relate to a time when the house was privately owned, Ruth is drawn ever more deeply into the case. But as spring turns into summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the trail by frightening her, and her unborn child, half to death.The Janus Stone is a riveting follow-up to Griffiths’s acclaimed The Crossing Places.]]> 337 Elly Griffiths Wouter 2 3.96 2010 The Janus Stone (Ruth Galloway, #2)
author: Elly Griffiths
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> Victim 177185976
Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background—murdered drug dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity—can be a key to doors he didn’t even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer.

As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there’s not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn’t seem to care about Javi’s newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after Javi graduates, a viral essay transforms him from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his “unique perspective.� But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once Gio’s released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi’s charade, or will it all come crumbling down?

A satirical sendup of tear-jerking trauma plots with a tender portrait of friendship at its core, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.]]> 276 Andrew Boryga 0385549970 Wouter 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Victim
author: Andrew Boryga
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> We Used to Live Here 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Wouter 0 to-read 3.66 2024 We Used to Live Here
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> The Yellow Wall-Paper 286957
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the “horrid� wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.

A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

Excerpt:
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.]]> 62 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1558611584 Wouter 0 abandoned 4.11 1892 The Yellow Wall-Paper
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1892
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
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]]> The Victorian Chaise Longue 1052340 119 Marghanita Laski 0897330978 Wouter 0 to-read 3.60 1953 The Victorian Chaise Longue
author: Marghanita Laski
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Eighth Life 41071389 Six romances, one revolution, the story of the century.

'That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.'

At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste ...

Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north, following her new husband, Simon, to his posting at the centre of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. Stasia's is only the first in a symphony of grand but all too often doomed romances that swirl from sweet to sour in this epic tale of the red century.

Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.]]> 944 Nino Haratischwili 191161746X Wouter 0 abandoned 4.47 2014 The Eighth Life
author: Nino Haratischwili
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: abandoned
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]]> <![CDATA[The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1: 1969-73]]> 60409964 In this first of a groundbreaking multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1: 1969-73 captures the life of Paul McCartney in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which McCartney recreated himself as both a man and a musician. Informed by hundreds of interviews, extensive ground up research, and thousands of never-before-seen documents THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1 is an in depth, revealing exploration of McCartney’s creative and personal lives beyond the Beatles.

When Paul McCartney issued a press release in April 1970 announcing that the world’s most beloved band, the Beatles, had broken up no one could have predicted that McCartney himself would go on to have one of the most successful solo careers in music history. Yet in the years after the Fab Four disbanded, Paul McCartney became a legend in his own right. Now journalist and world-renowned Beatles� historian Allan Kozinn and award-winning documentarian Adrian Sinclair chronicle in technicolor McCartney’s pivotal years from 1969 to 1973, as he recreated himself in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles breakup � a period when, newly married and with a growing family, he conquered depression and self-doubt, formed a new band, Wings, and recorded five epochal albums culminating in the triumphant smash, Band on the Run.

Part 1 of a multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL. 1 documents a pivotal moment in the life of a man whose legacy grows increasingly more relevant as his influence on music and pop culture remains as relevant as ever. It is the first truly comprehensive biography, and the most finely detailed exploration of McCartney’s creative life beyond the Beatles, ever undertaken.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.]]> 720 Allan Kozinn 0063000709 Wouter 0 currently-reading 4.47 The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1: 1969-73
author: Allan Kozinn
name: Wouter
average rating: 4.47
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> Praiseworthy 123263848 736 Alexis Wright 1922725323 Wouter 0 currently-reading 3.78 2023 Praiseworthy
author: Alexis Wright
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 Wouter 4 3.82 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Wouter
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves:
review:

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