John's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 17:52:33 -0700 60 John's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Outfit (Parker, #3) 10325940 222 Richard Stark 0226772896 John 0 currently-reading 4.14 1963 The Outfit (Parker, #3)
author: Richard Stark
name: John
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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]]> Obit 53029244 Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.]]> 113 Victoria Chang 1556595743 John 0 currently-reading 4.29 2020 Obit
author: Victoria Chang
name: John
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
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]]> Neverwhere (London Below, #1) 14497
"Neverwhere" is the London of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Strange destinies lie in wait in London below - a world that seems eerily familiar. But a world that is utterly bizarre, peopled by unearthly characters such as the Angel called Islington, the girl named Door, and the Earl who holds Court on a tube train.

Now a single act of kindness has catapulted young businessman Richard Mayhew out of his safe and predictable life - and into the realms of "Neverwhere." Richard is about to find out more than he ever wanted to know about this other London. Which is a pity. Because Richard just wants to go home...]]> 370 Neil Gaiman 0060557818 John 4 FUN! 4.17 1996 Neverwhere (London Below, #1)
author: Neil Gaiman
name: John
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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FUN!
]]> <![CDATA[Blue Ruin: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 222764630 From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.]]> 272 Hari Kunzru 0593686985 John 0 to-read 4.00 2024 Blue Ruin: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Hari Kunzru
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
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]]> Mysticism 203613915 A probing, inspiring exploration of mysticism not as religious practice but as a mode of experience and way of life by one of the most provactive philosophical thinkers of our time.Why mysticism? Evelyn Underhill defined mysticism as “experience in its most intense form,� and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It's not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. A rough and ready definition of mysticism is that it is a way of systematically freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Mysticism is the practical possibility of the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.This is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. It is also book about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot, and how writing and poetry can help to show us the way there. It is a book full of learning, puzzlement, pleasure, and wonder. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life. Mysticism as start now.]]> 336 Simon Critchley 1681378248 John 0 currently-reading 3.80 Mysticism
author: Simon Critchley
name: John
average rating: 3.80
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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 John 4 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: John
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Night Sky with Exit Wounds 23841432 89 Ocean Vuong John 5 4.20 2016 Night Sky with Exit Wounds
author: Ocean Vuong
name: John
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems]]> 36203674 A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent

In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular onKoreanso-called “comfort women,� women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.

In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country,� Yoon asks. “What is right in war.�

Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims,Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.]]> 80 Emily Jungmin Yoon 0062843699 John 5 4.22 2018 A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems
author: Emily Jungmin Yoon
name: John
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out: Poems]]> 22929732

A profound new collection from one of poetry's rising stars

"Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les � . . . He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.' . . . And, yes, as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era, she is indeed the one by whom the language lives." ―Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

A sublime singer of existential bewilderment, Karen Solie is one of contemporary poetry's most direct and haunting voices. A poet of the in-between places―the purgatory of wayside motels and junkyards, the abandoned Calgary ski jump and the eternal noon of Walmart―her poems stake out startlingly new territory and are songs for our emerging world, an age of uncertainty and melting icebergs.
In Solie's new collection, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out , she restlessly excavates our civilization, the moments of tough luck, casual violence, naked desire, and inchoate menace, pursuing "Beauty and terror / in equal measure" and fixing on the "Intrigue of a boarded-up building. / We want to get in there and find out what's the matter with it." Amplifying the elegant recklessness of her Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection Pigeon , these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.]]> 128 Karen Solie 0374298505 John 5 4.03 2015 The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out: Poems
author: Karen Solie
name: John
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries]]> 8075404


In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.� Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.�



In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.”All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master� of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.]]> 560 Helen Vendler 0674048679 John 0 currently-reading 4.34 2010 Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries
author: Helen Vendler
name: John
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> Architect 199633344 ձ> 78 Alison Thumel 1682262480 John 5 4.82 2024 Architect
author: Alison Thumel
name: John
average rating: 4.82
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories]]> 56587384 The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories captures a hundred years of vivid story-telling.

Here are peddlers and donkeys travelling across moonlit fields; artists drinking and debating in the tea-houses of Seoul; soldiers fighting for survival; exiles from the war who can never go home again; and lonely men and women searching for connection in the dizzying modern city. The collection features stories by some of Korea's greatest writers, including Hwang Sun-wŏn, Pak Wansŏ, O Chŏnghŭi and Cho Chŏngnae, as well as many brilliant contemporary voices, such as P'yŏn Hyeyŏng, Han Yujoo and Kim Aeran. Curated by Bruce Fulton, and introduced by Kwon Youngmin, this is a volume that will surprise, unsettle and delight.]]> 512 Bruce Fulton 0241448484 John 0 currently-reading 3.77 2023 The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories
author: Bruce Fulton
name: John
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> The Möbius Book 217388128 A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. She soon realized that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.]]> 240 Catherine Lacey 0374615403 John 0 to-read 4.08 2025 The Möbius Book
author: Catherine Lacey
name: John
average rating: 4.08
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]]> All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 John 5 4.19 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: John
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> Ghost Of 36514744 Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.]]> 88 Diana Khoi Nguyen 1632430525 John 5 4.34 2018 Ghost Of
author: Diana Khoi Nguyen
name: John
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough]]> 195790731
For the past fifteen years, Ian Frazier has been walking the Bronx. Paradise Bronx reveals the amazingly rich and tumultuous history of this amazingly various piece of our greatest city. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Native Americans, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx that gave birth to hip-hop, Frazier’s loving exploration is a moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is America today.

During the Revolution, when the Bronx was unclaimed territory known as the Neutral Ground, some of the war’s decisive battles were fought here by George Washington’s troops. Gouverneur Morris, one of the most colorful Founding Fathers, owned a huge swath of the Bronx, where he lived when he was not in Paris during the French Revolution or helping write the US Constitution.

Frazier shows us how the coming of the railroads and the subways drove the settling of the Bronx by various waves of immigration� Irish, Italian, Jewish (think the Grand Concourse), African American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican (J.Lo is one of the borough’s most famous citizens). The romance of the Yankees, the disaster of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the invention of rap and hip-hop, the resurgence of community as the borough’s communities learn mutual aid―all are investigated, recounted, and celebrated in Frazier’s inimitable voice.

This is a book like no other about a quintessential American city and the resilience and beauty of its citizens.]]> 576 Ian Frazier 0374280568 John 5 4.04 2024 Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough
author: Ian Frazier
name: John
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1 216933039
"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

First, read the story that started the Murderbot phenomenon in All Systems Red!

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid � a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.� Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is (and to watch its favorite show in its downtime.)

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

Then, In Artificial Condition Murderbot teams up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A� stands for), and together, they infiltrate the mining facility where Murderbot went rogue to try to understand its past.

What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…]]> 320 Martha Wells 1250389828 John 4 4.31 2017 The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1
author: Martha Wells
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Poetry 2024 (The Best American Poetry series)]]> 207294243 Renowned poet Mary Jo Salter, whose command of verse forms and high intelligence is universally acknowledged, selects the poems for the 2024 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best� anthology that really lives up to its title� (Chicago Tribune).The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world� (Academy of American Poets) since 1988. Each volume presents a curated selection of the year’s most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering unique insight into their work. Here, guest editor Mary Jo Salter, whose own poems display a sublime wit “driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable� (James Longenbach), has picked seventy-five poems that capture the dynamism of American poetry today. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that assess the current state of American poetry, and this year’s edition is certain to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the most important poetry anthology of our time.]]> 240 David Lehman 1982186798 John 0 currently-reading 3.65 2024 The Best American Poetry 2024 (The Best American Poetry series)
author: David Lehman
name: John
average rating: 3.65
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]]> Modern Poetry: Poems 127282577
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean ? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,� Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.� What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.]]> 112 Diane Seuss 1644452758 John 5 4.29 Modern Poetry: Poems
author: Diane Seuss
name: John
average rating: 4.29
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rating: 5
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 John 5 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: John
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> Bright Dead Things 24945396
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine� striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,� the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.]]> 105 Ada Limon 1571314717 John 5 4.21 2015 Bright Dead Things
author: Ada Limon
name: John
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Autobiography of Horse: A Poem]]> 44141377 The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

A frenetic tour of a splayed self writing through an equine obsession.

I became obsessed. I swallowed myself whole and turned into a knot. I couldn't undo myself, so I crawled inside a horse. Inside the horse I hardened, and then broke. The horse collected the pieces and glued me back together. I unraveled the horse and stitched it back together. The horse trampled me and I burned through its hooves.

Autobiography of Horse documents Jenifer Sang Eun Park's obsessive and parasitic relationship with the horse. At one point a muse, the horse is transformed into a vessel used to travel the volatile hollows of memory, selfhood, depression, and loss. To make this journey, the horse mutates from an image into a companion, a projection, and a reflection that, as Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," injects imagination with "the strength of reality."

Presented in lyrical prose, diagrams, photos, and conceptual excerpts from imagined texts, Autobiography of Horse pieces together a true story spurred by a tormented, pathological, and, ultimately, redemptive imagination.]]> 94 Jenifer Sang Eun Park 0982814240 John 4 4.54 Autobiography of Horse: A Poem
author: Jenifer Sang Eun Park
name: John
average rating: 4.54
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rating: 4
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]]> Shroud 230237860 On a planet shrouded in darkness, a stranded crew must fight for survival. But, the darkness may have plans of its own in this wildly original story from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of Children of Time.

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists � and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

ձ> 448 Adrian Tchaikovsky John 0 to-read 3.57 2025 Shroud
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: John
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> Invisible Strings 9084001
New poetry by Jim Moore, who “elevates economy of phrase to an art� (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

No, I don’t know
the way to get there.
Two empty suitcases sit in the corner,
if that’s any kind of clue.
—from “Almost Sixty�

Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.
]]> 96 Jim Moore 155597581X John 5 4.20 2011 Invisible Strings
author: Jim Moore
name: John
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> In the Next Galaxy 292949
�In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her �80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.”—National Book Award Judges� statement

“Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone’s poems are composed with an accessible deftness.”�The Oregonian

Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.]]> 99 Ruth Stone 1556592078 John 5 4.18 2002 In the Next Galaxy
author: Ruth Stone
name: John
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> Bog Queen 222376503 “An absolute astonishment.� -Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Outlawed, the gripping story of an anthropologist's monumental discovery and the clash of civilizations it sets off over the fate of the land that holds us.

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.

The mystery of the Iron Age body draws the attention of numerous groups with competing the archaeologists who want to study the surrounding bog, the peat-cutters who want to profit from the land's resources, and a group of environmental activists and neo-pagans who demand the body be returned to its resting place and that the moss-layered bog-a marvel of carbon capture on a warming planet-be left undisturbed. Then there's the moss a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes is drawn into the controversy stirred by the body and its habitat, she must face not only the deep history of what she has unearthed, but also the relationships she has forsworn in her bid for independence. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with climate urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.]]> 288 Anna North 163557966X John 0 to-read 4.67 Bog Queen
author: Anna North
name: John
average rating: 4.67
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> The Corrected Version 129656342 68 Rosanna Young Oh 1939728592 John 5 4.33 The Corrected Version
author: Rosanna Young Oh
name: John
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
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]]> Finger Exercises for Poets 200655904 208 Dorianne Laux 1324050667 John 5 4.49 Finger Exercises for Poets
author: Dorianne Laux
name: John
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 5
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]]> The Metamorphosis 17986414 The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

In her new translation of Kafka’s masterpiece, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment.]]> 126 Franz Kafka 0393347095 John 5 3.89 1915 The Metamorphosis
author: Franz Kafka
name: John
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1915
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge]]> 519494 Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary


if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
-from Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.]]> 178 Harryette Mullen 1555974562 John 5 4.17 2006 Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge
author: Harryette Mullen
name: John
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> Rose 220061 Rose with a rare sensitivity. The images Lee finds, such as the rose and the apple, are repeated throughout the book, crossing over from his father's China to his own America. Every word becomes transformative, as even his father's blindness and death can become beautiful. There is a strong enough technique here to make these poems of interest to an academic audience and enough originality to stun readers who demand alternative style and subject matter.

� Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York]]> 71 Li-Young Lee 0918526531 John 5 4.30 1986 Rose
author: Li-Young Lee
name: John
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> Dance Dance Revolution 402564 128 Cathy Park Hong 0393064840 John 5 3.86 2007 Dance Dance Revolution
author: Cathy Park Hong
name: John
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Digest (Stahlecker Selections)]]> 22002089 75 Gregory Pardlo 1935536508 John 5 4.00 2014 Digest (Stahlecker Selections)
author: Gregory Pardlo
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> The Hunter (Parker, #1) 618399
University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of this series to print.]]> 208 Richard Stark John 5 4.01 1962 The Hunter (Parker, #1)
author: Richard Stark
name: John
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 John 4 3.89 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: John
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary]]> 17287063 discarded plastic bag we see in every city
blown down the street with vagrant wind.
—from Urban Tumbleweed

Urban Tumbleweed is thepoet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, “What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk� in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?”]]> 138 Harryette Mullen 1555976565 John 5 3.89 2013 Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
author: Harryette Mullen
name: John
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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]]> Beasting 63323869 84 Timothy Ree 1646629302 John 5 5.00 Beasting
author: Timothy Ree
name: John
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
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]]> Long Bright River 55835660 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

[Moore's] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love." - The New York Times Book Review

This is police procedural and a thriller par excellence, one in which the city of Philadelphia itself is a character (think Boston and Mystic River). But it's also a literary tale narrated by a strong woman with a richly drawn personal life - powerful and genre-defying." - People

A thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel... I absolutely loved it.
--Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]> 497 Liz Moore 0525540687 John 0 to-read 4.15 2020 Long Bright River
author: Liz Moore
name: John
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> Vineland 59721
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.

Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.]]> 480 Thomas Pynchon 3499136287 John 5 3.75 1990 Vineland
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> A Poetry Handbook 71652 Poetry Handbook was written with writers of poetry most vividly in my mind; their needs and problems and increase have most directly been my concerns. But I am hopeful that readers of poetry will feel welcome here, too, and will gain from these chapters an insight into the thoughtful machinery of the poem, as well as some possibly useful ideas about its history, and, if you please, some ideas also of the long work and intense effort that goes into the making of a poem. The final three chapters are especially directed towards issues important to the writer of poems, but here too the reader of poems is heartily welcome. (...)"

[Text taken from the final part of the Introduction written by Mary Oliver]]]> 130 Mary Oliver 0156724006 John 5 4.23 1994 A Poetry Handbook
author: Mary Oliver
name: John
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> The Ax 176811
Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company when the cost-cutting ax falls, and he is laid off. Eighteen months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search -- with agonizing care, Devore finds the seven men in the surrounding area who could take the job that rightfully should be his, and systematically kills them. Transforming himself from mild-mannered middle manager to ruthless murderer, he discovers skills ne never knew ne had -- and that come to him far too easily.]]> 352 Donald E. Westlake 0446606081 John 4 3.92 1997 The Ax
author: Donald E. Westlake
name: John
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> Still Born 211004075 224 Guadalupe Nettel 1639735380 John 0 to-read 4.12 2020 Still Born
author: Guadalupe Nettel
name: John
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Changelings 216594939
Then, Hen disappears into the woods. She’s been whisked away to the land of Faerie, and it’s up to Izzy to save her. Joined there by a band of outlaw Changelings, Izzy and her new friends set out on a joint search-and-rescue mission across this foreign land which is at turns alluringly magical and utterly terrifying.]]> 304 Christina Soontornvat 1464234779 John 0 to-read 4.80 2016 The Changelings
author: Christina Soontornvat
name: John
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Poetry 2023 (The Best American Poetry series)]]> 101161171
Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world� (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work.

For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive� (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today.

Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.]]> 224 David Lehman 1982186755 John 5 3.49 The Best American Poetry 2023 (The Best American Poetry series)
author: David Lehman
name: John
average rating: 3.49
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
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]]> Animal Farm 170448 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 John 4 4.07 1945 Animal Farm
author: George Orwell
name: John
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 4
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]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. John 4 4.10 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: John
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 4
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]]> frank: sonnets 53317415 WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY COLLECTION
WINNER OF THE 2021 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY

A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,� Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of “beauty or relief.� Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and―in a word―frank.]]> 137 Diane Seuss 1644450453 John 5 4.50 2021 frank: sonnets
author: Diane Seuss
name: John
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> Katabasis 210191773 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 560 R.F. Kuang 0063021471 John 0 to-read 4.26 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: John
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> Collected Poems 1956�1987 3484331 The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet. Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.

As the poet David Shapiro has written, “The poems of Ashbery may seem so open that they become, like Hamlet, that rare inexhaustible thing, the irreducible fact of great art.� This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the texts of his first twelve books: Some Trees (1956), selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets; The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972), saluted by John Hollander as “a meditational masterpiece�; The Vermont Notebook (1975), presented with the original art by Joe Brainard; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); and April Galleons (1987). In addition it presents an unprecedented gathering of more than 60 previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades.

To read Ashbery’s work in sequence is to marvel at his refusal to rest on what has already been accomplished, his insistence on constantly renewed modes of expression. It is to become aware as well of the way his poetry chronicles life as really lived—“the way things have of enfolding / When your attention is distracted for a moment”—amid the surfaces of the quotidian (waking, dreamt, imagined, remembered) and the equally pervasive, equally elusive and deceptive surfaces of language. Through all his metamorphoses he has continued to work with incomparable freedom and humor: Ashbery (in the words of James Longenbach) “is constitutionally incapable of narrowing the possibilities for poetry.”]]> 1045 John Ashbery 1598530283 John 0 currently-reading 4.39 2008 Collected Poems 1956–1987
author: John Ashbery
name: John
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert]]> 18835210 434 Jack Gilbert John 0 currently-reading 4.29 2012 Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
author: Jack Gilbert
name: John
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025]]> 212806694
Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,� “Lunch Break,� “After-Work Drinks,� “Night Shift�), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,� Young notes), the more serious �40s and �50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political �60s and �70s, the lyrical �80s and �90s, and then the 2000s� with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World�?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems�: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.]]> 1024 The New Yorker 0593801938 John 0 currently-reading 4.62 2025 A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025
author: The New Yorker
name: John
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> Phantom Pain Wings 62972499 208 Kim Hyesoon 0811231712 John 5 3.96 Phantom Pain Wings
author: Kim Hyesoon
name: John
average rating: 3.96
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Short Stories 2023]]> 124925532 A collection of the year's best short stories, selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee and series editor Heidi Pitlor.

Min Jin Lee, author of the highly acclaimed National Book Award Finalist Pachinko, selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.]]> 331 Min Jin Lee 0063275929 John 5 3.75 2023 The Best American Short Stories 2023
author: Min Jin Lee
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> King of Ashes 219833252 Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.]]> 352 S.A. Cosby 1250832063 John 0 to-read 4.53 2025 King of Ashes
author: S.A. Cosby
name: John
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/14
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]]> Brooklyn Crime Novel 84089388 A sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing over fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.

In the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes by the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering façade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.]]> 384 Jonathan Lethem 0062938827 John 5 3.43 2023 Brooklyn Crime Novel
author: Jonathan Lethem
name: John
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> The Accidentals: Stories 211004813 The Accidentalsis the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.]]> 144 Guadalupe Nettel 1639734929 John 0 to-read 4.05 2023 The Accidentals: Stories
author: Guadalupe Nettel
name: John
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)]]> 214504702 Ursula K. Le Guin’s timeless and revered A Wizard of Earthsea is reimagined in a richly expansive graphic novel by acclaimed artist Fred Fordham, creator of stunning adaptations To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World.

"The magic of Earthsea is primal; the lessons of Earthsea remain as potent, as wise, and as necessary as anyone could dream." —Neil Gaiman

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and unleashed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

Experience the bestselling first adventure of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle as a masterly crafted graphic novel. Fred Fordham brings new life to Le Guin's iconic fantasy classic with his breathtaking illustrations and thoughtful text adaptation.]]> 288 Fred Fordham 0063285762 John 0 to-read 4.07 2025 A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)
author: Fred Fordham
name: John
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Exit Zero 211934921 Twelve delightfully strange, haunting stories from the acclaimed, oracular author of Beautyland.

Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness� haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.]]> 208 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374616477 John 0 to-read 3.75 Exit Zero
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)]]> 61219635 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250886088.

A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes.

After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time.

The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success—not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.

If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won't be able to go it alone.

But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.]]> 304 Travis Baldree John 3 4.17 2022 Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)
author: Travis Baldree
name: John
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/15
date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> Mice 1961 201111706
Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.]]> 260 Stacey Levine 1959163019 John 4 3.64 2024 Mice 1961
author: Stacey Levine
name: John
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> Rich Dad, Poor Dad 69571 195 Robert T. Kiyosaki 0751532711 John 3 4.10 1997 Rich Dad, Poor Dad
author: Robert T. Kiyosaki
name: John
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett John 5 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: John
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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Re-read Huck Finn before reading this. So glad I did, not that this doesn't stand (toweringly) on its own. But taken together, what a sublime, profound reading experience. James on its own, though, is an incredible novel, may have to place it at the top of my all-time favorites. Such a moving, subversive, propulsive read. James, the character, will certainly be one of the most memorable literary creations you'll ever encounter. And the way Everett connected his book to HF in the first half before moving on to more powerful, unflinching concerns of his own, just shows so much literary craft, creativity, control, and chutzpah. Timeless.
]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 John 5 3.82 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: John
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
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it's kind of scary how brilliant this book is. the irony is so modern. but there's also great heart and profundity and humor. some of the best characters ever put down on paper. arguably THE great american novel.
]]> <![CDATA[Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1)]]> 12000020
But against all odds, when Ari and Dante meet, they develop a special bond that will teach them the most important truths of their lives, and help define the people they want to be. But there are big hurdles in their way, and only by believing in each other—and the power of their friendship—can Ari and Dante emerge stronger on the other side.]]> 390 Benjamin Alire Sáenz 1442408928 John 4 4.29 2012 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1)
author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz
name: John
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk John 5 3.93 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: John
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 John 5 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: John
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 John 4 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: John
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
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]]> Three Keys (Front Desk #2) 53033829
She and her parents are the proud owners of the Calivista Motel, Mia gets to run the front desk with her best friend, Lupe, and she’s finally getting somewhere with her writing! But as it turns out, sixth grade is no picnic�
1. Mia’s new teacher doesn’t think her writing is all that great.
2. The motel is struggling, and Mia has to answer to the Calivista’s many, many worried investors.
3. A new immigration law is looming and if it passes, it will threaten everything—and everyone—in Mia’s life.

It’s a roller coaster of challenges, and Mia needs all of her determination to hang on tight. But if anyone can find the key to getting through turbulent times, it’s Mia Tang!]]> 271 Kelly Yang John 5 4.39 2020 Three Keys (Front Desk #2)
author: Kelly Yang
name: John
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> The Underground Railroad 30555488
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]> 320 Colson Whitehead 0385542364 John 5 4.04 2016 The Underground Railroad
author: Colson Whitehead
name: John
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> God's Country 173476035 This ‘comic and fierce� novel spoofs the classic Western format with the dark, incisive humor we’ve come to expect from its acclaimed author.

One of the earliest works anchoring Percival Everett’s illustrious career, God’s Country is by turns funny, shocking, and devastating. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. Unfortunately, he’s a coward. When he sees a band of “Injun impersonators� pillaging his home, he has “half a mind to ride down that hill and say somethin�, but it was just half a mind after all.� It’s 1871, and he’s lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder enlists the help of the best tracker in the West: a Black man named Bubba.

With an introduction from renowned novelist Madison Smartt Bell, this is the perfect edition to add to your growing Percival Everett collection. As NPR’s Michael Schaub noted, “It’s impossible to predict what the next Everett book will bring, but it's always a safe bet that it's going to be great.”]]> 219 Percival Everett 0807016292 John 5 4.23 1994 God's Country
author: Percival Everett
name: John
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> The Eyes Are the Best Part 195703882 Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying� yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 278 Monika Kim 1645661237 John 3 3.81 2024 The Eyes Are the Best Part
author: Monika Kim
name: John
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Hikaru no Go, Vol. 1: Descent of the Go Master (Hikaru no Go, #1)]]> 13590 DESCENT OF THE GO MASTER

Hikaru Shindo is like any sixth-grader in Japan: a pretty normal school boy with a two-tone head of hair and a penchant for antics. One day, he finds an old bloodstained Go board in his grandfather's attic - and that's when thing get really interesting. Trapped inside the Go board is Fujiwara-no-Sai, the ghost of an ancient Go master who taught the strategically complex bpard game to the Emperor of Japan many centuries ago. In one fateful moment, Sai becomes a part of Hikaru's consciousness and together, through thick and thin, they make an unstoppable Go-playing team. Will they be able to defeat Go players who have dedicated their lives to the game? Will Sai achieve the "Divine Move" so he'll finally be able to rest in peace? Begin your journey with Hikaru and Sai in this first volume of Hikaru no Go.]]> 187 Yumi Hotta 159116222X John 5 4.12 1999 Hikaru no Go, Vol. 1: Descent of the Go Master (Hikaru no Go, #1)
author: Yumi Hotta
name: John
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
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]]> The Membranes 55825321
First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes--heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies--into a sensitive portrait of one young woman's quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader's own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation brings Chi's hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.]]> 168 Chi Ta-wei 0231195710 John 5 4.00 1995 The Membranes
author: Chi Ta-wei
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
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]]> Out 25365
The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of Out and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako's own search for a way out of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan's yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a Thelma and Louise kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.]]> 400 Natsuo Kirino 1400078377 John 4 3.95 1997 Out
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: John
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road]]> 57789644
It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever, but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen� or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots in Hollywood history.

Production stalled several times, stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron clashed repeatedly in the brutal Namib Desert, and Miller’s crew engineered death-defying action scenes that were among the most dangerous ever committed to film. Even accomplished Hollywood figures are flummoxed by the accomplishment: As the director Steven Soderbergh has said, “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.�

Kyle Buchanan takes readers through every step of that moviemaking experience in vivid detail, from Fury Road’s unexpected origins through its outlandish casting process to the big-studio battles that nearly mutilated a masterpiece. But he takes the deepest dive in reporting the astonishing facts behind a shoot so unconventional that the film’s fantasy world began to bleed into the real lives of its cast and crew. As they fought and endured in a wasteland of their own, the only way forward was to have faith in their director’s mad vision. But how could Miller persevere when almost everything seemed to be stacked against him?

With hundreds of exclusive interviews and details about the making of Fury Road, readers will be left with one undeniable conclusion: There has never been a movie so drenched in sweat, so forged by fire, and so epic in scope.]]> 384 Kyle Buchanan 0063084341 John 4 4.31 2022 Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road
author: Kyle Buchanan
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> Once Was Willem 212987930 From the bestselling author M. R. Carey comes an utterly unique and enchantingly dark epic fantasy fable like no other.

This is the tale of Once Was Willem, who - eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England - rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham.

Pennick for all its beauty was ever a place with a dark reputation. The forests of the Chase were said to be home to nixies and boggarts, and there was a common belief, passed down through many generations, that the castle housed an unquiet ghost of terrible and malign power. These rumours I can attest were all true; indeed they fell short of the truth by a long way . . .]]> 310 M.R. Carey 0316505129 John 0 to-read 4.09 2025 Once Was Willem
author: M.R. Carey
name: John
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Incal (The Incal Saga, #1)]]> 10842223 307 Alejandro Jodorowsky 1594650152 John 0 currently-reading 4.12 1981 The Incal (The Incal Saga, #1)
author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
name: John
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sorcerer of the North (Ranger's Apprentice, #5)]]> 6703763 alone!

Several years have passed since the apprentice and his master, Will and Halt, first met, and Will is finally a full-fledged Ranger with his own fief to look after. The fief seems sleepy?boring, even?until Lord Syron, master of a castle far in the north, is struck down by a mysterious illness. Joined by his friend Alyss, Will is suddenly thrown headfirst into an extraordinary adventure, investigating fears of sorcery and trying to determine who is loyal to Lord Syron. As Will battles growing hysteria, traitors, and most of all, time, Alyss is taken hostage, and Will is forced to make a desperate choice between his mission and his friend.

Perfect for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire series.




]]> 324 John Flanagan John 3 4.35 2006 The Sorcerer of the North (Ranger's Apprentice, #5)
author: John Flanagan
name: John
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> Annihilation 205363946
As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI � the French counter-terrorism agency � scrambling for answers.

An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children � Cécile, a fervent Catholic; Aurélien, a sensitive artist; and Paul, the government bureaucrat � have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father, who is in a coma, from the medical centre where he is wasting away.

Houellebecq’s latest novel reveals new sides to his writing, adding compassion and tenderness to the emotions of rage, disgust and irony that have powered both him and his earlier works to international fame.]]> 544 Michel Houellebecq 0374608423 John 4 3.74 2022 Annihilation
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: John
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> Faust 406373 Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephistopheles and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.]]> 503 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0385031149 John 5 3.90 1808 Faust
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: John
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1808
rating: 5
read at: 2014/07/13
date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Battle for Skandia (Ranger's Apprentice, #4)]]> 144350
Still far from their homeland after escaping slavery in the icebound land of Skandia, the Ranger's apprentice and the princess's plan to return to Araluen is spoiled when Evanlyn is taken captive by a Temujai warrior. Though still weakened by the warmweed's toxic effects, Will employs his Ranger training to locate his friend, but an enemy scouting party has him fatally outnumbered. Will is certain death is close at hand, until old friends make a daring, last-minute rescue. The reunion is cut short, however, when they make a horrifying discovery: Skandia's borders have been breached by the entire Temujai army. And Araluen is next in their sights.

If two kingdoms are to be saved, the unlikeliest of unions must be made. Will it hold long enough to vanquish a ruthless new enemy? Or will past tensions spell doom for all?

The battles and drama are nonstop in Book Four of this hugely popular epic.]]> 294 John Flanagan 0399244573 John 4 4.35 2006 The Battle for Skandia (Ranger's Apprentice, #4)
author: John Flanagan
name: John
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Icebound Land (Ranger's Apprentice, #3)]]> 127823
ձ> 266 John Flanagan 0399244565 John 4 4.24 2005 The Icebound Land (Ranger's Apprentice, #3)
author: John Flanagan
name: John
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> My Death 6218239
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?]]> 93 Lisa Tuttle 1902880900 John 5 3.88 2004 My Death
author: Lisa Tuttle
name: John
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Burning Bridge (Ranger's Apprentice, #2)]]> 144349 Bracing for a final clash with the evil warlord Morgarath, the Rangers rally the kingdom's allies, and Will is chosen, along with his friend Horace, as special envoys to nearby Celtica. But the simple mission soon takes an unsettling turn - the Celticans have disappeared, their town abandoned. The scheming hand of Morgarath, it seems, has been far from idle. He has found a way to bring his legions over the once impassible eastern mountains and is planning to ambush the king's army in a rout. Now with help many miles away, Will and Horace are the only ones standing in the way of the dark lord's plans. They have shown great skill and courage in their training, but how will they fare in the face of true evil?

With bigger battles and higher stakes, John Flanagan's epic adventure charges ahead with this rousing follow-up to The Ruins of Gorlan.

]]> 262 John Flanagan 0399244557 John 4 4.31 2005 The Burning Bridge (Ranger's Apprentice, #2)
author: John Flanagan
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves:
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]]> My Life in Middlemarch 17883928 Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.

In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.]]> 293 Rebecca Mead 0307984761 John 3 3.60 2014 My Life in Middlemarch
author: Rebecca Mead
name: John
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> Greek Lessons 61686012 “Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.�

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 192 Han Kang 0593595270 John 4 3.53 2011 Greek Lessons
author: Han Kang
name: John
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ruins of Gorlan (Ranger's Apprentice, #1)]]> 60400 249 John Flanagan 0142406635 John 4 4.25 2004 The Ruins of Gorlan (Ranger's Apprentice, #1)
author: John Flanagan
name: John
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lay of the Land (Frank Bascombe, #3)]]> 12372
With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later—after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—was hailed by The Times of London as “an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.� Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life’s endless complexities than ever before.

Frank's story resumes in the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving, permitting him to revel in the acceptance of “that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all—knows of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that’s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.� But as a Presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him along with crises both marital and medical, Frank discovers that what he terms the Permanent Period is fraught with unforeseen perils: “All the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies.�

A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forget—at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound. The Lay of the Land is astonishing in its own right and a magnificent expansion of one of the most celebrated chronicles of our time.]]> 485 Richard Ford 0679454683 John 5 3.91 2006 The Lay of the Land (Frank Bascombe, #3)
author: Richard Ford
name: John
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance � award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film � Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future � and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team � well trained but eccentric � has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch� somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 John 0 to-read 3.61 2024 Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: John
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Moderan 2699898
Moderan is one of the most startingly original, provocative & fascinating future worlds in all of science fiction.

In Moderan, men are made mostly of metal. They retain strips of flesh to contain their humanity. They live in Strongholds. They prowl the war rooms of their Strongholds and plan wars.

Quite a world, Moderan. Come visit. The war is about to begin...

Contents:
- Introduction
Part I: The Beginnings
- Thinking Back (Our God Is a Helpful God!)
- No Cracks or Saggings
- The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day
- New Kings Are Not for Laughing
- One Time, a Red Carpet...
- Battle Won
- Head Thumping the Troops
- New-Metal Mistress Time
- And So White Witch Valley
- The Bird Man of Moderan
- Bubble-Dome Homes
- One False Step
- Survival Packages
- New-Metal
- Of Hammers & Men
- The Stronghold
- 2064, or Thereabouts
- Penance Day in Moderan
- Strange Shape in the Stronghold
- Getting Regular
- The Walking, Talking I-Don't-Care Man
Part II: Everyday Life in Moderan
- To Face Eternity
- In the Innermost Room of Authority
- The Problem
- Playmate
- A Husband's Share
- A Complete Father
- Was She Horrid?
- A Glance at the Past
- Educational
- It Was Black Cat Weather
- Sometimes I Get So Happy
- Remembering
- A Little Girl's Xmas in Moderan
- The Flesh-Man from Far Wide
Part III: Intimations of the End
- The One from Camelot Moderan
- Reunion
- The Warning
- Has Anyone Seen This Horseman?
- Interruption in Carnage
- The Miracle of the Flowers
- Incident in Moderan
- The Final Decision
- Will-Hung & Waiting
- How They Took Care of Soul in a Last Day for a Non-Beginning
- How It Ended

]]> 240 David R. Bunch 0380024039 John 0 to-read 3.83 1971 Moderan
author: David R. Bunch
name: John
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Young Once (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 25738962 Young Once is a crucial book in the career of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been called “the most gripping Modiano book of all� (Der Spiegel).

Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis’s thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth.]]> 177 Patrick Modiano 1590179560 John 5 3.71 1981 Young Once (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Patrick Modiano
name: John
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2017/02/16
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Land of Milk and Honey 214932073 The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.]]> 240 C Pam Zhang 0593538250 John 0 to-read 3.55 2023 Land of Milk and Honey
author: C Pam Zhang
name: John
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> Middlemarch 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]> 912 George Eliot 0451529170 John 5 4.00 1872 Middlemarch
author: George Eliot
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1872
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/19
date added: 2024/09/19
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]]> Still Life with Remorse 200740843 A moving meditation in words and pictures on remorse, joy, ancestry, and memory

Maira Kalman’s most autobiographical and intimate work to date, Still Life with Remorse is a beautiful, four-color collection combining deeply personal stories and fifty striking full-color paintings in the vein of her and Alex Kalman’s acclaimed Women Holding Things.

Tracing her family’s story from her grandfather’s birth in Belarus and immigration to Tel Aviv—where she was born—Kalman considers her unique family history, illuminating the complex relationship between recollection, regret, happiness, and heritage. The vibrant original art accompanying these autobiographical pieces are mostly still-lifes and interiors, which serve as counterpoints to her powerful words. In addition to vignettes exploring her Israeli and Jewish roots, Kalman includes short stories about other great artists, writers, and composers, including Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Schumann.

Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories.]]> 144 Maira Kalman 0063391813 John 0 to-read 4.13 Still Life with Remorse
author: Maira Kalman
name: John
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> Gabriel's Moon 215198466 In his most exhilarating novel yet, Britain’s greatest storyteller transports you from the vibrant streets of sixties London to the sun-soaked cobbles of Cadiz and the frosty squares of Warsaw, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession.

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy�, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story.]]> 272 William Boyd 0802164870 John 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Gabriel's Moon
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.]]> 288 C Pam Zhang 0525537201 John 5 3.77 2020 How Much of These Hills Is Gold
author: C Pam Zhang
name: John
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The Vaster Wilds 214932060
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.]]> 272 Lauren Groff 0593418409 John 0 to-read 3.75 2016 The Vaster Wilds
author: Lauren Groff
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Future 208840580 The bestselling, award-winning author ofThe Power deliversa dazzling tour de forcewherea handful of friendsplota daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.]]> 432 Naomi Alderman 1668025698 John 0 to-read 3.82 2023 The Future
author: Naomi Alderman
name: John
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Under the Same Stars 200982339
In 1940s Germany, Sophie is excited to discover a message waiting for her in the Bridegroom's Oak from a mysterious suitor. Meanwhile, her best friend, Hanna, is sending messages too—but not to find love. As World War II unfolds in their small town of Kleinwald, the oak may hold the key to resistance against the Nazis.

In 1980s West Germany, American teen transplant Jenny feels suffocated by her strict parents and is struggling to fit in. Until she finds herself falling for Lena, a punk-rock girl hell-bent on tearing down the wall separating West Germany from East Germany, and meeting Frau Hermann, a kind old lady with secrets of her own.

In Spring 2020, New York City, best friends Miles and Chloe are slogging through the last few months of senior year when an unexpected package from Chloe’s grandmother leads them to investigate a cold case about two unidentified teenagers who went missing under the Bridegroom’s Oak eighty years ago.

Age Range: 12-18]]> 480 Libba Bray 0374388946 John 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Under the Same Stars
author: Libba Bray
name: John
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu]]> 55643292
Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge on the men who destroyed Ming, aided by a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers, whom they meet on the journey. Ming blazes his way across the West, settling old scores with a single-minded devotion that culminates in an explosive and unexpected finale.

Written with the violent ardor of Cormac McCarthy and the otherworldly inventiveness of Ted Chiang, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is at once a thriller, a romance, and a story of one man’s quest for redemption in the face of a distinctly American brutality.]]> 275 Tom Lin 0316542156 John 5 3.65 2021 The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
author: Tom Lin
name: John
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]>