Sunil's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 24 Apr 2025 12:57:59 -0700 60 Sunil's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Dutch House 44569767 The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades,ĚýThe Dutch HouseĚýis a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

]]> 353 Ann Patchett 0062963694 Sunil 0 currently-reading 4.25 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]]> 8520610 The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.Ěý

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.]]> 333 Susan Cain 0307352145 Sunil 0 to-read 4.07 2012 Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
author: Susan Cain
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore]]> 201750634 "It is a delight to wander through the bookstores of American history in this warm, generous book."
—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author and owner of Books Are Magic

An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, weĚýsee the what has been, and what might be lost.

Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.]]> 416 Evan Friss 0593299930 Sunil 5 books, non-fiction 4.02 2024 The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
author: Evan Friss
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: books, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile]]> 223853543 From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight back

When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans; yet a hundred years later, that dream is running on empty.

Instead of unbounded freedom, the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs, among them the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for car infrastructure; an epidemic of violent death; countless hours lost in traffic; isolation from our fellow human beings; and the ongoing destruction of the natural world.ĚýGlobally, SUVs alone now emit more carbon than the nations of Germany, South Korea, or Japan.

That’s why we need Life After Cars. Through historical records, revealing interviews, and unflinching statistics, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the podcast The War on Cars, and former host Aaron Naparstek unpack the scale of damage that cars cause, the forces that have created our current crisis and are invested in perpetuating it, and the way that the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable and just society.

Cars as we know them today are unsustainable—but there is hope. Life After Cars will arm readers with the tools they need to implement real, transformative change, from simply raising awareness to taking a stand at public forums. It’s past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile. Together, let’s create a better Life After Cars.]]> Sarah Goodyear 0593850734 Sunil 0 to-read 0.0 Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile
author: Sarah Goodyear
name: Sunil
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> James 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin�), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon� (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]> 304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Sunil 5 civil-war, fiction, history 4.60 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: civil-war, fiction, history
review:

]]> The Alchemist 218129518
Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.]]> 208 Paulo Coelho 0063442469 Sunil 0 to-read 3.90 1988 The Alchemist
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s]]> 198112183 "John Ganz is the most important young political writer of his generation—just the one our dark moment needs." —Rick Perlstein

"Lively and kaleidoscopic." —Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker

"John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct . . . When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times." —Jeet Heer

A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today.

With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 422 John Ganz 0374605459 Sunil 3 history, non-fiction 4.14 2024 When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
author: John Ganz
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: history, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)]]> 61242426
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.]]> 296 Travis Baldree Sunil 0 to-read 4.04 2022 Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)
author: Travis Baldree
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI]]> 214175198
More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 320 John Warner 1541605500 Sunil 0 to-read 4.07 2025 More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
author: John Warner
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places]]> 207573383 A genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto for rewilding the city, the self, and society.

A Natural History of Empty Lots is a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect. To do this, we must challenge our assumptions of nature itself.

During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruinedâ€� spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 296 Christopher Brown 1643263374 Sunil 0 to-read 3.92 2024 A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
author: Christopher Brown
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> Automatic Noodle 217388015 From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.

While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service� reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?]]> 176 Annalee Newitz 1250357462 Sunil 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Automatic Noodle
author: Annalee Newitz
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Vegetarian 34845512
“Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year)
“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff
“Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

One of the Best Books of the Year—BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly]]> 185 Han Kang Sunil 3 asia, fiction 3.57 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: asia, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand]]> 215361966 In this beautifully written memoir, an accomplished journalist leaves New York City to work as an amateur farmhand at Princeton Seminary, while harvesting spiritual lessons that change his life

JeffĚýChu had a seemingly successful life. As a writer at a fast-paced magazine company, he penned glossy profiles of business leaders while living with his husband in a New York City brownstone. YetĚýhe struggled, as many of us do, with feelings of loneliness and disillusionment, all while trying to reconcile his identity as a first-generation Chinese American. Seeking a remedy,ĚýheĚýleft his job and enrolled at Princeton Seminary’s “Farminary,â€� a 21-acre farm where students learn to work the soil while asking the big questions of life.

As the seasons turn, Chu introduces us to a cast of characters, human and not, each with their own lesson to teach. From the cranes that visit the pond, to the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, to the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu gently interrogates his relationship with the food on his plate and his own heritage, discovering what the earth is trying to teach us--if we’ll stop and listen.

In gorgeous, moving prose, Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to each other at a time when we are drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more meaningful life, this book is a tribute to friendship, acceptance, spirituality, and how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.]]> 336 Jeff Chu 0593727363 Sunil 0 to-read 4.28 2025 Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
author: Jeff Chu
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cinema Speculation 61198870 Instant New York Times bestseller

The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1ĚýNew York TimesĚý˛ú±đ˛őłŮ˛ő±đ±ô±ôľ±˛Ô˛µĚýOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive.ĚýFor years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films.ĚýNow, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans—and all movie lovers—could have hoped for.ĚýOrganized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time,Ěýthis book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining.ĚýAt once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 398 Quentin Tarantino Sunil 0 currently-reading 4.21 2022 Cinema Speculation
author: Quentin Tarantino
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World]]> 214268997
A transformative guide to rethinking our approach to goals, creativity, and life itself from a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, and the creator of the popular Ness Labs newsletter

Life isn’t linear, and yet we constantly try to mold it around linear goals: four-year college degrees, ten-year career plans, thirty-year mortgages. What if instead we approached life as a giant playground for experimentation? Based on ancestral philosophy and the latest scientific research, Tiny Experiments provides a desperately needed reframing: Uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis.

Neuroscientist and entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff reveals that all you need is an experimental mindset to turn challenges into self-discovery and doubt into opportunity. Readers will replace the old linear model of success with a circular model of growth in which goals are discovered, pursued, and adapted—not in a vacuum, but in conversation with the larger world.

Throughout the book, you will ask hard questions and design simple yet meaningful experiments to find the answers. You will learn how to break free from the invisible cognitive scripts that shape your life, how to harness the power of imperfection, and how to make smarter decisions when the path forward is unclear.

This is a guide to:
� Discover your true ambitions through conducting tiny personal experiments
� Dismantle harmful beliefs about success that have kept you stuck
� Dare to make decisions true to your own aspirations
� Stop trying to find your purpose and start living instead

Tiny Experiments offers not just practical tools to make sure our most vital work gets done, but a guide to reawakening our curiosity and drive in a noisy, busy, disaffected world, so that we can discover and pursue our most authentic ambitions while making a meaningful contribution.]]> 304 Anne-Laure Le Cunff 0593715136 Sunil 0 to-read 4.26 Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
author: Anne-Laure Le Cunff
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> The Let Them Theory 216351768
If you've ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or frustrated with where you are, the problem isn't you. The problem is the power you give to other people. Two simple words�Let Them—will set you free. Free from the opinions, drama, and judgments of others. Free from the exhausting cycle of trying to manage everything and everyone around you. The Let Them Theory puts the power to create a life you love back in your hands—and this book will show you exactly how to do it.

In her latest groundbreaking book, The Let Them Theory, Mel Robbins�New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's most respected experts on motivation, confidence, and mindset—teaches you how to stop wasting energy on what you can't control and start focusing on what truly YOU. Your happiness. Your goals. Your life.

Using the same no-nonsense, science-backed approach that's made The Mel Robbins Podcast a global sensation, Robbins explains why The Let Them Theory is already loved by millions and how you can apply it in eight key areas of your life to make the biggest impact. Within a few pages, you'll realize how much energy and time you've been wasting trying to control the wrong things—at work, in relationships, and in pursuing your goals—and how this is keeping you from the happiness and success you deserve.

Written as an easy-to-understand guide, Robbins shares relatable stories from her own life, highlights key takeaways, relevant research and introduces you to world-renowned experts in psychology, neuroscience, relationships, happiness, and ancient wisdom who champion The Let Them Theory every step of the way.

Learn how

Stop wasting energy on things you can't control Stop comparing yourself to other peopleBreak free from fear and self-doubtRelease the grip of people's expectationsBuild the best friendships of your lifeCreate the love you deservePursue what truly matters to you with confidenceBuild resilience against everyday stressors and distractionsDefine your own path to success, joy, and fulfillment. . . and so much more.

The Let Them Theory will forever change the way you think about relationships, control, and personal power. Whether you want to advance your career, motivate others to change, take creative risks, find deeper connections, build better habits, start a new chapter, or simply create more happiness in your life and relationships, this book gives you the mindset and tools to unlock your full potential.

Order your copy of The Let Them Theory now and discover how much power you truly have. It all begins with two simple words.]]> 311 Mel Robbins 1401971377 Sunil 2 4.18 2024 The Let Them Theory
author: Mel Robbins
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
This could have been a fortune cookie.
]]> Hello Beautiful 217005288
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano 0593243757 Sunil 0 to-read 4.13 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Rose Code 54067525
The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Huntress and The Alice Network returns with another heart-stopping World War II story of three female code breakers at Bletchley Park and the spy they must root out after the war is over.

1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything—beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses—but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Imperious self-made Mab, product of east-end London poverty, works the legendary codebreaking machines as she conceals old wounds and looks for a socially advantageous husband. Both Osla and Mab are quick to see the potential in local village spinster Beth, whose shyness conceals a brilliant facility with puzzles, and soon Beth spreads her wings as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. But war, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy will tear the three apart.

1947. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter--the key to which lies buried in the long-ago betrayal that destroyed their friendship and left one of them confined to an asylum. A mysterious traitor has emerged from the shadows of their Bletchley Park past, and now Osla, Mab, and Beth must resurrect their old alliance and crack one last code together. But each petal they remove from the rose code brings danger--and their true enemy--closer...]]> 646 Kate Quinn Sunil 4 fiction, history, ww2 4.55 2021 The Rose Code
author: Kate Quinn
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: fiction, history, ww2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War]]> 195607632
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Fort Sumter.
Ěý
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.�
Ěý
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Ěý
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.]]> 559 Erik Larson 0385348754 Sunil 0 currently-reading 4.37 2024 The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
author: Erik Larson
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wanderlust: A History of Walking]]> 78287 356 Rebecca Solnit 1859843816 Sunil 0 to-read 3.91 2001 Wanderlust: A History of Walking
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Lovely One: A Memoir 203165900
With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.

Named “Ketanji Onyika,� meaning “Lovely One,� based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations.

Here, Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.

Through trials and triumphs, Justice Jackson’s journey will resonate with dreamers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and refuse to be turned aside. This moving, open-hearted tale will spread hope for a more just world, for generations to come.]]> 418 Ketanji Brown Jackson 0593729919 Sunil 5 4.61 2024 Lovely One: A Memoir
author: Ketanji Brown Jackson
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: africa, autobiography, civil-war, history, non-fiction, politics, slavery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 52562628 292 Mark Twain Sunil 4 classic, fiction, slavery 4.10 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1884
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: classic, fiction, slavery
review:

]]> The Old Man and the Sea 2165 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses—specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.]]> 96 Ernest Hemingway 0684830493 Sunil 0 to-read 3.81 1952 The Old Man and the Sea
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> Ernest Hemingway on Writing 19761213 "Throughout Hemingway's career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing -- that it takes off 'whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk's feathers if you show it or talk about it.'"
Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived....
This book contains Hemingway's reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer's life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.
-- From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips]]> 160 Larry W. Phillips Sunil 0 to-read 4.05 1984 Ernest Hemingway on Writing
author: Larry W. Phillips
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain]]> 199544454 "A tale that will change how you look at the world."Ěý—Mark Leibovich

Part Michael Lewis, part The Way Things Work: From the New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent, an extraordinary journey revealing the worldwide supply chain�exposing both the fascinating pathways of manufacturing and transportation that bring products to your doorstep, and the ruthless business logic that has left local communities at the mercy of a complex and fragile network for their basic necessities.

?One of Foreign Policy's "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"

How does the wealthiest country on earth run out of protective gear in the middle of a public health catastrophe? How do its parents find themselves unable to locate crucially needed infant formula? How do its largest companies spend billions of dollars making cars that no one can drive for a lack of chips?

The last few years have radically highlighted the intricacy and fragility of the global supply chain. Enormous ships were stuck at sea, warehouses overflowed, and delivery trucks stalled. The result was a scarcity of everything from breakfast cereal to medical devices, from frivolous goods to lifesaving necessities. And while the scale of the pandemic shock was unprecedented, it underscored the troubling reality that the system was fundamentally at risk of descending into chaos all along. And it still is. Sabotaged by financial interests, loss of transparency in markets, and worsening working conditions for the people tasked with keeping the gears turning, our global supply chain has become perpetually on the brink of collapse.

In How the World Ran Out of Everything, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman reveals the fascinating innerworkings of our supply chain and the factors that have led to its constant, dangerous vulnerability. His reporting takes readers deep into the elaborate system, showcasing the triumphs and struggles of the human players who operate it—from factories in Asia and an almond grower in Northern California, to a group of striking railroad workers in Texas, to a truck driver who Goodman accompanies across hundreds of miles of the Great Plains. Through their stories, Goodman weaves a powerful argument for reforming a supply chain to become truly reliable and resilient, demanding a radical redrawing of the bargain between labor and shareholders, and deeper attention paid to how we get the things we need.

From one of the most respected economic journalists working today, How the World Ran Out of Everything is a fiercely smart, deeply informative look at how our supply chain operates, and why its reform is crucial—not only to avoid dysfunction in our day to day lives, but to protect the fate of our global fortunes.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 412 Peter S. Goodman 0063257939 Sunil 4 4.24 How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain
author: Peter S. Goodman
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: business, covid, farming, food, non-fiction, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir]]> 214175247 An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse townsâ€�; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journeyĚýto become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans.ĚýInĚýThe Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,ĚýCaseĚýbrings her trademarkĚýcandor andĚýprecisionĚýto a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisibleĚýgirl “raised by two dogs and a space heaterâ€� in rural Washington state toĚýher improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, CaseĚýshows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel theĚýmonotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love YouĚýis a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.


Ěý±Ő±Ő> 288 Neko Case 1538710501 Sunil 0 to-read 4.08 2025 The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir
author: Neko Case
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Message 211050274
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 237 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230396 Sunil 5 4.62 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: isreal, palestine, africa, civil-war, essays, history, non-fiction, politics, slavery, ww2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Sunil 0 to-read 4.39 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Martyr! 139401966 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 Sunil 5 death, fiction 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: death, fiction
review:

]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

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

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

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Sunil 0 to-read 3.66 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative]]> 13099738 160 Austin Kleon 0761169253 Sunil 4 books, nature, writing 3.95 2012 Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
author: Austin Kleon
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: books, nature, writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.]]> 207611509
In the spring of 1980, an unexpected group of musical eccentrics came together to play their very first performance at a college party in Athens, Georgia. Within a few short years, they had taken over the world - with smash records like Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster and Green. Raw, outrageous, and expressive, R. E. M. 's distinctive musical flair was unmatched, and a string of mega-successes solidified them as generational spokesmen. In the tumultuous transition between the wide-open 80s and the anxiety of the early 90s, R. E. M. challenged the corporate and social order, chasing a vision and cultivating a magnetic, transgressive sound.

In this rich, intimate biography, critically acclaimed author Peter Ames Carlin looks beyond the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll to open a window into the fascinating lives of four college friends - Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry - who stuck together at any cost, until the end. Deeply descriptive and remarkably poetic, steeped in 80s and 90s nostalgia, The Name of This Band is R. E. M. paints a cultural history of the commercial peak and near-total collapse of a great music era, and the story of the generation that came of age at the apotheosis of rock.]]> 464 Peter Ames Carlin 0385546947 Sunil 0 to-read 3.98 The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.
author: Peter Ames Carlin
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
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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 Sunil 0 to-read 4.29 Modern Poetry: Poems
author: Diane Seuss
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 181250294 THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

From New York Times bestselling coauthor ofĚýThe Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.� �New York Times Book Review

“Words that chill the parental heartâ€� Ěýthanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking worldâ€� lucid, memorableâ€� galvanizing.â€� â€�Wall Street Journal

"[An] important new book...The shift in kidsâ€� energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls."Ěý—Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood� began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood� in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood� has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems� that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 395 Jonathan Haidt 0593655044 Sunil 0 currently-reading 4.38 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource]]> 217869789 An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.� �New York Times

“Brilliant book� Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens� Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.� The Sirens� Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 336 Christopher L. Hayes 0593653114 Sunil 0 to-read 4.04 2025 The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
author: Christopher L. Hayes
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Sunil 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)]]> 60429621 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER â€� NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â€� AĚýgripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, byĚýthe New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu

“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.� �Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else.ĚýKen, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 312 Hua Hsu Sunil 5 4.09 2022 Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
author: Hua Hsu
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper]]> 213122563 The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks.

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionize our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James; shows how Darwin developed his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks and Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books; and introduces a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space to think—and so shaped the modern world.

In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and making us more creative, more productive—and happier.]]> 540 Roland Allen 1771966297 Sunil 3 4.35 2023 The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper
author: Roland Allen
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: books, history, non-fiction, simplify
review:

]]> Loved and Missed 58283993
Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, is a triumph.]]> Susie Boyt Sunil 0 to-read 4.24 2023 Loved and Missed
author: Susie Boyt
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> And Then There Were None 16299
"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none."

When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.]]> 264 Agatha Christie 0312330871 Sunil 0 to-read 4.28 1939 And Then There Were None
author: Agatha Christie
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> On Keeping a Notebook 60289895 Joan Didion Sunil 0 to-read 4.38 1966 On Keeping a Notebook
author: Joan Didion
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

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

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Sunil 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Sunil 0 to-read 4.47 2024 The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
author: Hampton Sides
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon]]> 199897225 From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the epic adventure tale The Emerald Mile comes the most dramatic and deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek. The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park, author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom. Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries. Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors� camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness. An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.]]> 505 Kevin Fedarko Sunil 3 4.49 2024 A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
author: Kevin Fedarko
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: nature, non-fiction, outdoors, pittsburgh
review:

]]> 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 Sunil 0 to-read 3.53 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman]]> 203579088 A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his wildly popular Outside Magazine piece.


Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s the name of a gravel road, the address of a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.


To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over six years or renovations.


CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of renovation, of seeing what could be instead of what is. It is a book for those who know what it’s like to bite off more than you can chew, or who desperately wish to.

]]> 304 Patrick Hutchison 1250285704 Sunil 0 to-read 4.05 2024 Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman
author: Patrick Hutchison
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen]]> 209615830 From visionary director Jon M. Chu comes a powerful, inspiring memoir of belonging, creativity, and learning to see who you really are.
Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights, or the groundbreaking film Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American, helping at his parentsâ€� Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. Growing up on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed to make his mark at USC film school, and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found himself struggling to understand who he was. In this book, for the first time, Chu turns the lens on his own life and work, telling the universal story of questioning what it means when your dreams collide with your circumstances, and showing how it’s possible to succeed even when the world changes beyond all recognition.ĚýWith striking candor and unrivaled insights, Chu offers a firsthand account of the collision of Silicon Valley and Hollywood—what it’s been like to watch his old world shatter and reshape his new one. Ultimately, Viewfinder is about reckoning with your own story, becoming your most creative self, and finding a path all your own.]]> 304 Jon M. Chu 0593448944 Sunil 0 to-read 4.25 Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen
author: Jon M. Chu
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting]]> 214458226 From the most visible woman writing about weightlifting today, a memoir and manifesto about how lifting helped dissolve her allegiance to diet culture; taught her to be at home in her body; and led her to grow every kind of strength.

InĚýA Physical Education,ĚýCasey Johnston recounts how she ventured into the brave new world of weightlifting, leaving behind years ofĚýrestrictive eating and endless cardio.ĚýWoven through the trajectory of how she rebuilt her strength and confidence is a staggering exposĂ© of the damaging doctrine spread by diet and fitness culture.Ěý

Johnston's story dives deep into her own past relationships with calorie restriction, cardio, and codependency. As she progresses on her weightlifting journey, carrying groceries and closing heavy doors become easier. She eats to fuel her growing strength, and her cravings vanish. Her physical progress fuels a growing how mainstream messaging she received about women’s bodies was always less about transformation and more about preserving the status quo. Having previously been convinced that physical improvement was a matter of suffering, now she learns it requires self-regard, and patience. Ultimately, she is dazzled by what a little pushing at a time adds up the reawakening of parts of herself she didn’t even know were there.

A Physical Education asks why so many of us spend our lives trying to “get healthyâ€� by actively making our bodies weaker. Casey Johnston is a voice for those of us who feel underdeveloped and unfulfilled in our bodies, for all of us looking to come home to ourselves.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 272 Casey Johnston 1538773252 Sunil 0 to-read 4.36 2025 A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting
author: Casey Johnston
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rebecca 17899948 Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.

First published in 1938, this classic gothic novel is such a compelling read that it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century.]]> 449 Daphne du Maurier 0316323705 Sunil 0 to-read 4.28 1938 Rebecca
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 199898189 From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on fascinating new archival research and in-depth reporting—a riveting history that reads like a thriller. On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told. Until now. Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, An American Tragedy follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a compelling tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and later hidden from the public. Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama and fascinating and absorbing science, Challenger brings to life a turning point in history—and the result is an even more complex and astonishing story than we remember.]]> 570 Adam Higginbotham 1982176636 Sunil 4 history, non-fiction, science 4.59 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: history, non-fiction, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire]]> 113206 One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York TimesĚý

From the editor of The New Yorker : a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.Ěý
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 588 David Remnick 0679751254 Sunil 0 to-read 4.24 1994 Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
author: David Remnick
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)]]> 38213061 From a New York Times bestselling and Hugo award-winning author comes a modern masterwork of science fiction, introducing a captain, his crew, and a detective as they unravel a horrifying solar system wide conspiracy that begins with a single missing girl.Ěý Humanity has colonized the solar system—Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond—but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for—and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations—and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.]]> 577 James S.A. Corey Sunil 4 4.48 2011 Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/04
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: fiction, scifi, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 Sunil 0 to-read 3.66 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Be Ready When the Luck Happens]]> 209192698 In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.Ěý

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.]]> 320 Ina Garten 0593799895 Sunil 4 4.25 2024 Be Ready When the Luck Happens
author: Ina Garten
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: autobiography, cooking, non-fiction
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 59016923 "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 70 Claire Keegan 0802158757 Sunil 4 fiction 4.22 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Fraud 123165183 From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story—and who deserves to be believed

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

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

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

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

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Sunil 3 fiction 3.37 2023 The Fraud
author: Zadie Smith
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Women 126918788 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 472 Kristin Hannah Sunil 4 fiction, history 4.71 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: fiction, history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump]]> 44148905 Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains inĚýAmerican Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view himĚýnot as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.

American CarnageĚýis the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment.

Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, andĚýtechnologicalĚýdisruptionĚýduring that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive?

Loaded with explosiveĚýoriginal reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among many othersâ€�American CarnageĚýtakes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.]]> 688 Tim Alberta 006289644X Sunil 0 to-read 4.15 2019 American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump
author: Tim Alberta
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> My Thoughts Exactly 40949782 So, this is me. Lily Allen. I am a mother, and I was a wife. I'm also a singer and a songwriter. I have loved and been let down. I've been stalked and assaulted. I am a success and a failure. I've been broken and full of hope. I am all these things and more. I'm telling my truth because when women share their stories, loudly and clearly and honestly, things begin to change - for the better. So, this is my story. These are my thoughts exactly.
**Includes an exclusive new chapter**]]> 381 Allen Lily 1911600923 Sunil 0 to-read 3.96 2018 My Thoughts Exactly
author: Allen Lily
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Sunil 0 to-read 4.52 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Unprotected: A Memoir 56969425
“Bold, hilarious, honest, and singular. . . . Unprotected is a record of survival, commitment to authenticity, and healing; a road map out of hell.� —Leslie Odom Jr.

It’s easy to be yourself when who and what you are is in vogue. But growing up Black and gay in America has never been easy. Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic Emmy-winning performance in the celebrated TV show Pose ; before he was the groundbreaking Tony and Grammy award-winning star of Broadway’s Kinky Boots ; and before he was an acclaimed recording artist, actor, playwright, director, and all-around legend, Porter was a young boy in Pittsburgh who was seen as different, who didn’t fit in. At five years old, Porter was sent to therapy to “fix� his effeminacy. He was endlessly bullied at school, sexually abused by his stepfather, and criticized at his church. Porter came of age in a world where simply being himself was a constant struggle.

Billy Porter’s Unprotected is the life story of a singular artist and survivor in his own words. It is the story of a boy whose talent and courage opened doors for him, but only a crack. It is the story of a teenager discovering himself, learning his voice and his craft amid deep trauma. And it is the story of a young man whose unbreakable determination led him through countless hard times to where he is now; a proud icon who refuses to back down or hide. Porter is a multitalented, multifaceted treasure at the top of his game, and Unprotected is a resonant, inspirational story of trauma and healing, shot through with his singular voice.]]> 288 Billy Porter 1419746197 Sunil 0 to-read 4.45 2021 Unprotected: A Memoir
author: Billy Porter
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mystic River 21671
Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.]]> 416 Dennis Lehane 0060584750 Sunil 0 to-read 4.17 2001 Mystic River
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day]]> 39317186 From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint, a simple 4-step system for improving focus, finding greater joy in your work, and getting more out of every day

Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do. Why?
ĚýĚýĚýĚý In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about.
ĚýĚýĚýĚý As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction.
ĚýĚýĚýĚý A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.]]> 304 Jake Knapp 0525572430 Sunil 4 4.23 2018 Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
author: Jake Knapp
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves: exercise, meditation, non-fiction, productivity, simplify
review:

]]> The 5am Club 53424992
Legendary leadership and elite performance expert Robin Sharma introduced The 5 AM Club concept over twenty years ago, based on a revolutionary morning routine that has helped his clients maximize their productivity, activate their best health and bulletproof their serenity in this age of overwhelming complexity.

Now, in this life-changing book, handcrafted by the author over a rigorous four year period, you will discover the early-rising habit that has helped so many accomplish epic results while upgrading their happiness, helpfulness and feelings of aliveness.

Through an enchanting—and often amusing—story about two struggling strangers who meet an eccentric tycoon who becomes their secret mentor, The 5 AM Club will walk you through:

� How great geniuses, business titans and the world’s wisest people start their mornings to produce astonishing achievements
â–� A little-known formula you can use instantly to wake up early feeling inspired, focused and flooded with a fiery drive to get the most out of each day
â–� A step-by-step method to protect the quietest hours of daybreak so you have time for exercise, self-renewal and personal growth
â–� A neuroscience-based practice proven to help make it easy to rise while most people are sleeping, giving you precious time for yourself to think, express your creativity and begin the day peacefully instead of being rushed
� “Insider-only� tactics to defend your gifts, talents and dreams against digital distraction and trivial diversions so you enjoy fortune, influence and a magnificent impact on the world]]> 314 Robin Sharma Sunil 0 didnt-finish 3.31 2018 The 5am Club
author: Robin Sharma
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: didnt-finish
review:

]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Sunil 4 fiction, outdoors 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: fiction, outdoors
review:

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

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Sunil 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What I Ate in One Year [and related thoughts]]]> 214050410 â€Sharing food is one of the purest human acts'

Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime.

Now, in What I Ate In One Year Tucci records twelve months of eating, in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.

Ranging from the mouth-wateringly memorable, to the comfortingly domestic, to the infuriatingly inedible, the meals memorialised in this diary are a prism for him to reflect on the ways his life, and his family, are constantly evolving. Through food he marks - and mourns - the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, and steels himself for what is to come.

Whether it’s duck a l’orange eaten with fellow actors and cooked by singing Carmelite nuns, steaks barbequed at a gathering with friends, or meatballs made by his mother and son and shared at the table with three generations of his family, these meals give shape and add emotional richness to his days.]]> 349 Stanley Tucci 1405963735 Sunil 0 to-read 4.34 2024 What I Ate in One Year [and related thoughts]
author: Stanley Tucci
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hello Beautiful 207599286 Can love make a broken person whole?

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it's as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable: Sylvie, the family's dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

But then darkness from William's past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia's carefully orchestrated plans for their future but the sisters' unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.]]> 387 Ann Napolitano 0593243730 Sunil 0 to-read 4.05 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[World Travel: An Irreverent Guide]]> 50508525 A guide to some of the world’s most fascinating places, as seen and experienced by writer, television host, and relentlessly curious traveler Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania’s utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter—and many places beyond.


InĚýWorld Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places—in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid,ĚýWorld TravelĚýprovides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.

Supplementing Bourdain’s words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about a place, including sardonic accounts of traveling with Bourdain by his brother, Chris; a guide to Chicago’s best cheap eats by legendary music producer Steve Albini, and more. Additionally, each chapter includes illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook..

For veteran travelers, armchair enthusiasts, and those in between,ĚýWorld TravelĚýoffers a chance to experience the world like Anthony Bourdain.


]]> 478 Anthony Bourdain 0062802771 Sunil 0 to-read 3.53 2021 World Travel: An Irreverent Guide
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Trust 59039413
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

“Buzzy and enthralling …A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery…Fun as hell to read.� � Oprah Daily

"A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring �20s and Great Depression." � Vanity Fair

“A riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed.”Ěýâ€� Esquire

"Exhilarating.� � New York Times

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds , a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýHernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
Ěý Ěý At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 415 Hernan Diaz 0593420330 Sunil 4 fiction 3.97 2022 Trust
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Morning and Evening 26221990 109 Jon Fosse Sunil 0 to-read 3.97 2000 Morning and Evening
author: Jon Fosse
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience]]> 203608467 AnĚýillustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine's award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center ofĚýthe American story.

Here, in these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act. --Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface

Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features seven chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in late August of 1619, when a cargo ship of enslaved people from Africa arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future.Ěý

Filled with original art by thirteen Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this gorgeous volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project.

Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture.]]> 288 Nikole Hannah-Jones 0593232259 Sunil 0 to-read 4.46 The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience
author: Nikole Hannah-Jones
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Why We're Polarized 54303152
Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, it offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Donald Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.]]> 352 Ezra Klein 1476700362 Sunil 0 to-read 4.20 2020 Why We're Polarized
author: Ezra Klein
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts]]> 205363955 Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life � one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves.

Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, it offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls â€imperfectionismâ€�. How can we embrace our non-negotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? What if purposeful productivity were often about letting things happen, not making them happen?

Reflecting on ideas drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores practical tools and shifts in perspective. The result is a bracing challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.

To be read either as a four-week â€retreat of the mindâ€� or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.]]> 208 Oliver Burkeman 0374611998 Sunil 0 to-read 4.27 2024 Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
author: Oliver Burkeman
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout]]> 174136033 ~ Do Fewer Things. Work at a Natural Pace. Obsess over Quality. ~

From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, a groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload

Our current definition of “productivityâ€� is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of Ěýburnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkersĚý–Ěýfrom Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe â€� Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,â€� a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for cultivating a slower, more humane alternative.

From the aggressive rethinking of workload management, to introducing seasonal variation, to shifting your performance toward long-term quality, Slow Productivity provides a roadmap for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment. The world of work is due for a new revolution. Slow productivity is exactly what we need.]]> 256 Cal Newport 0593544862 Sunil 4 3.99 2024 Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
author: Cal Newport
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: business, covid, non-fiction, productivity
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55223004 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B08GJVLGGX.

A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green Sunil 5 autobiography, non-fiction 4.31 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/08
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: autobiography, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer]]> 214971755

Inside, you will learn how to:


Effortlessly capture ideas before they slip away
Save the most relevant insights from what you read
Connect information in profound and unexpected ways
Transform individual notes into articles, blog posts, and books
Start every writing session with words already on the page
Develop a system for writing that not only supports your creativity, but inspires it


If you're done with writer's block, information overload, forgetting ideas, and waiting around for inspiration to strike, then read this book. It was written for you. ]]> 206 Bob Doto Sunil 4 4.19 A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer
author: Bob Doto
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: books, non-fiction, productivity, writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism]]> 197522510 Whole Foods Market’s Cofounder and CEO for 44 years, John Mackey offers an intimate and provocative account of the rise of this iconic company and the personal and spiritual journey that inspired its remarkable impact.

The growth of Whole Foods isn’t just a business success story—it’s the story of a retail, cultural, and dietary revolution that has forever changed the industry and the way we eat. After more than four decades at the helm, John Mackey is ready to share never-before-told tales of the people and passions behind the beloved brand.
�

The Whole Story invites readers on the adventure of building Whole Foods Market: the colorful cast of idealists and foodies who formed the company’s DNA, the many breakthroughs and missteps; the camaraderie and the conflict, and the narrowly avoided disasters. Mackey takes us inside some of the most consequential decisions he had to make and honestly shares his regrets looking back.Ěý
â€�

Beyond the Whole Foods story, Mackey also dives into his:
� Spiritual journey: from Christianity to New Age mysticism, Eastern wisdom, and life-changing awakenings through psychedelics
� Political and intellectual development: from countercultural co-op dweller to libertarian and Conscious Capitalist
� Philosophical and ethical awakenings: especially with regard to animal welfare and the tension between his personal values and industry practices
� Personal passions: most notably, his love of long-distance, ultra-light backpacking on the great trails of our country and planet

For the millions of people who know and love Whole Foods, Mackey’s story is a candid look at the fellowship and meaning born of a shared mission and how an inimitable entrepreneur shepherded a startup hippy food store into the market-leading international brand it is today.]]> 368 John Mackey 1637745125 Sunil 0 to-read 4.11 The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism
author: John Mackey
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life]]> 36982602 A groundbreaking and inspiring book that challenges our relationship withĚýalcoholĚýby exploring the psychological factors behindĚýalcoholĚýuse and the cultural influences that contribute to dependency. Ěý Many people question whether drinking has become too big a part of their lives, and worry that it may even be affecting their health. But, they resist change because they fear losing the pleasure and stress-relief associated with alcohol, and assume giving it up will involve deprivation and misery. Ěý Ěý This Naked Mind offers a new, positive solution. Here, Annie Grace clearly presents the psychological and neurological components of alcohol use based on the latest science, and reveals the cultural, social, and industry factors that support alcohol dependence in all of us. Packed with surprising insight into the reasons we drink and Annie’s own extraordinary and candid personal story, This Naked Mind will open your eyes to the startling role of alcohol in our culture, and how the stigma of alcoholism and recovery keeps people from getting the help they need. This Naked Mind will give you freedom from alcohol. It removes the psychological dependence so that you will not crave alcohol, allowing you to easily drink less (or stop drinking). With clarity, humor, and a unique blend of science and storytelling, This Naked Mind will open the door to the life you have been waiting for. Ěý â€�You have given me my live back.â€� —Katy F., Albuquerque, New Mexico “This is an inspiring and groundbreaking must-read. I am forever inspired and changed.â€� â€�Kate S., Los Angeles, California “The most selfless and amazing book that I have ever read.â€� â€�Bernie M., Dublin, Ireland]]> 263 Annie Grace 0996715010 Sunil 2 4.39 2015 This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life
author: Annie Grace
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: non-fiction, self-help, sobriety
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)]]> 33396171 ASIN B01MYZ8X5C moved to the more recent edition

A murderous android discovers itself in All Systems Red, a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial Intelligence.

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

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

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.]]> 156 Martha Wells Sunil 4 4.27 2017 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)
author: Martha Wells
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life]]> 203578897 “Brigid Schulte is a vital voice on the future of work, and her carefully researched book lights the way to fewer hours, less stress, and more meaning.�
―Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Hidden Potential, and host of the podcast WorkLife

From the New York Times bestselling author of Overwhelmed, a deeply reported exploration of why American work isn’t working and how our lives can be made more meaningful

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte’s groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America’s quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.

Drawing on years of research, Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until today, with millions of people working multiple hourly jobs or in white-collar positions where no hours are ever off duty.

She casts a wide net in search of solutions, exploring the movement to institute a four-day workweek, introducing Japan’s Housewives Brigade—which demands legal protection for family time—and embedding with CEOs who are making the business case for humane conditions. And she demonstrates the power of a collective and creative demand for change, showing that work can be organized in an infinite number of ways that are good for humans and for business.

Fiercely argued and vividly told, rich with stories and informed by deep investigation, Over Work lays out a clear vision for ending our punishing grind and reclaiming leisure, joy, and meaning.]]> 432 Brigid Schulte 1250801729 Sunil 0 to-read 3.89 Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life
author: Brigid Schulte
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.89
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir]]> 217245583
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes—the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula—took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.�

Through the frame of a 300-mile-long pilgrimage walk, Things Become Other Things folds together history, literature, poetry, Shinto and Buddhist spirituality, and contemporary rural life in Japan via dozens of conversations with aging fishermen, multi-generational inn owners, farmers, and kissaten cafe “mamas.� Along the way, Mod communes with mountain fauna, marvels over evidence of bears and boars, and hopscotches around leeches. He encounters whispering priests and foul-mouthed little kids who ask him "just what the heck are you, anyway?" Through sharp prose and his curious archive of photographs, he records evidence of floods and tsunamis, the disappearance of life on the peninsula, and the capricious fecundity of nature.

Things Become Other Things blends memoir and travel writing at their best, transporting readers to an otherwise inaccessible Japan, one only made visible through Mod’s unique bicultural lens.]]> 320 Craig Mod 0593732545 Sunil 0 to-read 4.80 Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir
author: Craig Mod
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War]]> 59235119 The celebrated author ofĚýDouble CrossĚýandĚýRogue HeroesĚýreturns with his greatest spy story yet, a thrillingĚýAmericans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.Ěý

Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.]]> 415 Ben Macintyre Sunil 4 4.64 2018 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: biography, non-fiction, running, russia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever]]> 59644256
Backdoor access to Anom and a series of related investigations granted American, Australian, and European authorities a front-row seat to the underworld. Tens of thousands of criminals worldwide appeared in full view of the same agents they were trying to evade. International smugglers. Money launderers. Hitmen. A sprawling global economy as efficient and interconnected as the legal one. Officers watched drug shipments and murder plots unfold, making arrests without blowing their cover. But, as the FBI started to lose control of Anom, did the agency go too far?

A painstakingly investigated exposé, Dark Wire reveals the true scale and stakes of this unprecedented operation through the agents and crooks who were there. This fly-on-the-wall thriller is a caper for our modern world, where no one can be sure who is listening in.]]> Joseph Cox Sunil 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever
author: Joseph Cox
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Sunil 0 to-read 3.84 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most]]> 733463 320 Gwendolyn Bounds 0060564075 Sunil 0 to-read 3.98 2005 Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most
author: Gwendolyn Bounds
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party]]> 36589918 An alternate cover for this ASIN can be found: here

From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier

In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.]]> 376 Daniel James Brown Sunil 4 history, non-fiction 4.29 2009 The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party
author: Daniel James Brown
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves: history, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves]]> 199514774
How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? It’s an everyday act, easily taken for granted, but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. Banquets were held just so guests could enjoy the novelty of eggs, butter, and apples that had been preserved for months in cold storage—and demonstrate that such zombie foods were not deadly. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching an entirely new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but also seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.

In FROSTBITE, New Yorker contributor and co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers with her on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting such off-the-beaten-track landmarks as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s OJ reserves. Today, more than three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but as Twilley soon discovers, the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food, extending the distance between producers and consumers and redefining what “fresh� really means. More importantly, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a U.S.-style cold chain, Twilley asks, can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we? A deeply-researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, FROSTBITE makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.]]> 400 Nicola Twilley 0735223289 Sunil 0 to-read 4.18 2024 Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
author: Nicola Twilley
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/11
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]]> How to Say Babylon: A Memoir 73666310 With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.]]> 349 Safiya Sinclair 1982132353 Sunil 4 autobiography, non-fiction 4.50 2023 How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
author: Safiya Sinclair
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: autobiography, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: The Original 1876 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Mark Twain Classics)]]> 196840549 243 Mark Twain 1916700314 Sunil 3 classic, fiction 4.36 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: The Original 1876 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Mark Twain Classics)
author: Mark Twain
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1876
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: classic, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir]]> 55574594 272 Brian Broome 0358439116 Sunil 5 4.36 2021 Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir
author: Brian Broome
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: autobiography, non-fiction, pittsburgh
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster]]> 41717906
Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers not only its own citizens, but all of humanity. It is a story that has long remained in dispute, clouded from the beginning in secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation.

Midnight In Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of history's worst nuclear disaster, of human resilience and ingenuity and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will - lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats - remain not just vital but necessary.

Now, Higginbotham brings us closer to the truth behind this colossal tragedy.]]> 562 Adam Higginbotham Sunil 5 history, non-fiction, russia 4.45 2019 Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: history, non-fiction, russia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Sunil 0 to-read 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way)]]> 199598484 160 Richard Kyte 1682754723 Sunil 0 to-read 3.75 Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way)
author: Richard Kyte
name: Sunil
average rating: 3.75
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/08
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]]> American Dirt 45721673
Lydia Quixano PĂ©rez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.

Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy—two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?]]> 389 Jeanine Cummins Sunil 5 fiction 4.52 2020 American Dirt
author: Jeanine Cummins
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/06
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity]]> 44142112 A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.

Inside, you'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles--and why it just doesn't work. New development and high-risk investing don't generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens' quality of life.

Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the "traditional" search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.]]> 256 Charles L. Marohn Jr. 1119564816 Sunil 0 to-read 4.26 Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
author: Charles L. Marohn Jr.
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph]]> 20554127 #1 Wall Street Journal BestsellerThe Obstacle is the Way has become a cult classic, beloved by men and women around the world who apply its wisdom to become more successful at whatever they do. Its many fans include a former governor and movie star (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a hip hop icon (LL Cool J), an Irish tennis pro (James McGee), an NBC sportscaster (Michele Tafoya), and the coaches and players of winning teams like the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Chicago Cubs, and University of Texas men’s basketball team.The book draws its inspiration fromĚýstoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years “The impediment to action advances action.ĚýWhat stands in the way becomes the way.”ĚýRyan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.If you’re feeling frustrated, demoralized, or stuck in a rut, this book can help you turn your problems into your biggest advantages. And along the way it will inspire you with dozens of true stories of the greats from every age and era.]]> 202 Ryan Holiday 1101620595 Sunil 3 non-fiction 4.34 2014 The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
author: Ryan Holiday
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> King: A Life 65146135
The first full biography in decades, Eig mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs]]> 853 Jonathan Eig 0374719675 Sunil 4 4.71 2023 King: A Life
author: Jonathan Eig
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: biography, history, non-fiction, politics, slavery
review:

]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.ĚýYet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Sunil 0 to-read 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon]]> 199798198
The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors� camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.]]> 512 Kevin Fedarko 1501183052 Sunil 0 to-read 4.22 2024 A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
author: Kevin Fedarko
name: Sunil
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>