en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:17:57 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 199797604 A Japanese widow raises her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law.

Shortly after her husband Levi’s untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her nosy yet loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love and abandon frugality, but her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Always beside her is Alex, who lives confidently no matter the circumstance.]]> 256 Yukiko Tominaga 1668031671 Ryan 4 3.59 2024
author: Yukiko Tominaga
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
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]]> 23316521 The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigan family, and her four children.

Ardeevin, County Clare, Ireland. 1980. When her oldest brother Dan announces he will enter the priesthood, young Hanna watches her mother howl in agony and retreat to her room. In the years that follow, the Madigan children leave one by one: Dan for the frenzy of New York under the shadow of AIDS; Constance for a hospital in Limerick, where petty antics follow simple tragedy; Emmet for the backlands of Mali, where he learns the fragility of love and order; and Hanna for modern-day Dublin and the trials of her own motherhood. When Christmas Day reunites the children under one roof, each confronts the terrible weight of family ties and the journey that brought them home. The Green Road is a major work of fiction about the battles we wage for family, faith, and love.]]> 310 Anne Enright 0393248216 Ryan 0 currently-reading 3.50 2015
author: Anne Enright
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 202217335
In 1969, Honor Moore was twenty-three, a theater student yearning for love and working for radical change, but studying administration and keeping secret, even from herself, her wish to imagine the world by becoming a poet. There was an older lover, a professor, and, with another man, an unwanted sexual encounter. That spring, she had an abortion.

A Termination is the story of the young woman who made that decision, and of how that act of resistance, then shrouded in fear and silence, has reverberated throughout her life since. Angry, nostalgic, questioning, and romantic, the memoir pursues the associations of memory, moving from the New Haven of Yale Drama School, the Living Theatre, and the Black Panthers; to the New York City of theater, jazz, and the Chelsea Hotel; the Berkshires of rock and roll at Tanglewood, and Chicago in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Framing the story is a self-portrait of the author fifty-five years later, a woman with a sexual past, a poet who has made her own way. A lyric, searching memoir, A Termination asks what it means to write with full honesty about one's life—to explore who we were, and how our choices shape and allow who we become.]]> 112 Honor Moore Ryan 4 3.89
author: Honor Moore
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> 8116130 232 Iris Owens 1590173635 Ryan 4 3.55 1973
author: Iris Owens
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
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]]> 39025960
From a crowded apartment on Mott Street, where an immigrant family raises its first real Americans, to a pair of divers at the Beijing Olympics poised at the edge of success and self-discovery, Wang’s unforgettable characters �� with their unusual careers, unconventional sex lives and fantastical technologies �� share the bold hope that, no matter where they’ve come from, their lives too can be extraordinary.]]> 256 Xuan Juliana Wang 1984822748 Ryan 3 3.75 2019
author: Xuan Juliana Wang
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves:
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]]> 24875770 Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across the River delivered “an unsettling brew of growing menace spiked with flashes of genuine terror.��* Now, the World Fantasy Award-nominated author stakes a bloody claim on vampire mythology��
��
The secret is, vampires are real and I am one.

The secret is, I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry...
��
New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody—he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.
��
The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.
��
Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him…or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.
��
And neither are the rest of us.
��
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S BEST HORROR NOVEL OF THE YEAR

*New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson]]> 368 Christopher Buehlman 0425272621 Ryan 5 4.04 2014
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 8969785 244 Matt Haig 1615235302 Ryan 4 3.76 2008
author: Matt Haig
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves:
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]]> 62919399 A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,�� a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,�� and in “Candy Pink,�� a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.]]> 154 Agustina Bazterrica 1668012669 Ryan 3 3.11 2020
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 214269353 From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.��

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.]]> 311 Jinwoo Chong 0593727053 Ryan 5 4.03 2025
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> 213618144 From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story.

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him.

In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.

Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, motherhood and sisterhood, secrets and who has the right to reveal them—what of our past can be cast away and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.]]> 240 Evie Wyld 1101871903 Ryan 5 3.91 2024
author: Evie Wyld
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> 217245618
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

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

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 336 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Ryan 5 4.34 2025
author: Florence Knapp
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 63215787 From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation.

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag.

Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.

A poetic masterpiece that is a feat of historical fiction, epic family saga, and mind-bending story-telling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.]]> 720 Yū Miri 0593542665 Ryan 5 3.48 2004
author: Yū Miri
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
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]]> 204125438 200 Joan Maki 1936097524 Ryan 4 4.00
author: Joan Maki
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> 214151452 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668063700 Ryan 5 3.71 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
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]]> 214152231 A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.]]> 288 Madeleine Watts 1668051621 Ryan 5 3.90 2025
author: Madeleine Watts
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.�� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.��

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.��

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.�� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,�� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.��

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Ryan 5 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 213870076
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853945 Ryan 5 3.91 2025
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 213395487 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves�� (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various ��-ists�� who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.]]> 240 Lydia Millet 1324074418 Ryan 4 3.90
author: Lydia Millet
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 213395554 A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars.

Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she’s approached by a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backward through time to intervene in the fate of a warming planet.

Roban lives in the Colony, a sterile outpost of civilization, where he longs for the wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face down an uncertain future. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph. For his rationalist daughter Kenzie, such idealism is not enough to keep the rising floods at bay, so she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond.

In exploring the question “What if you could come back to the past and somehow change it with technology?�� Joe Mungo Reed has written an immersive story of hope, hubris, and sacrifice in the face of a frighteningly precarious present.]]> 256 Joe Mungo Reed 1324079371 Ryan 5 4.11 2025
author: Joe Mungo Reed
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> 210563324
"I'm going to call you Danny. What are you going to name me?"

"Angelo."

Danny is spending his sixteenth summer in Rome. As his mother spends the day at work in a mysterious museum, he wanders the ancient sites and streets. Soon after his arrival, he encounters a shadow... who becomes a voice... who becomes a boy his age. Angelo.

Soon Danny and Angelo are spending as much time as they can together, piecing together stories of the city while only gradually letting their own histories be shared. Attraction leads to affection, and affection leads to both an intimate closeness and a profound fear of what happens next. Danny has never really had a home, or known the love of another boy. Angelo seems to have more experience... but he also has secrets just out of Danny’s reach.

Run Away With Me is a stunning creation, weaving words and illustration to tell the story of a transformative love over the course of one Roman summer.]]> 320 Brian Selznick 1339035529 Ryan 5 4.21 2025
author: Brian Selznick
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
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An exquisite love story. Beautifully illustrated and told.
]]> 216970517 "Haddad’s debut novel shows off her mastery of prose and physical description, infusing each page with believable realism."—Rachel S. Hunt, Associated Press

In the mowed-down industrial north of Prince George, Canada, “white trash�� housewife Jenny Hayes shares a fence with the only First Nations woman in the neighborhood, Rachelle, and her two little girls. Jenny desperately wants a child and can’t understand why Rachelle, with her trash-pocked and overgrown yard, should have what Jenny wants most in the world. But Jenny tries to suppress her judgment as she has with her mother Fi, a cougar who chain smokes cigarettes instead of changing the full diapers of her boyfriend’s kids, and Missy, her best friend with Juicy Couture pulled tight over her baby bump and an unfurnished McMansion. Instead, she volunteers to babysit Rachelle’s girls�� brushing hair, folding laundry, and ignoring the stilettos tucked under the bed in Rachelle’s disheveled home.

But when two young women—the strawberry blonde, blue-eyed Beth Tremblay and Jenny’s own neighbor, Rachelle—disappear along Highway 16, only Beth’s face and name are plastered on billboards and broadcasted over the air. Rachelle’s daughters are carted off by the state, and Jenny takes it upon herself to investigate. After all, Jenny thinks, who else is looking for her pariah of a neighbor? Jenny stutters through police encounters, asks the people living on the Rez all the wrong questions and ultimately faces—alongside the reader—the complicated motive behind her “investigation.��

With great awareness and care, Lauren Haddad’s portrait of Jenny brilliantly exposes first our impulse to seek the myths—as opposed to the realities—of race, class, and gender oppression in rural communities, and the consequences when our concern for others is clouded by self-preoccupation. Gripping, unflinching, and rebellious, Fireweed begs the just how good are our good intentions?]]> Lauren Haddad 1662602898 Ryan 3 2.51 2025
author: Lauren Haddad
name: Ryan
average rating: 2.51
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars rounded down. Unsatisfying last 20 pages.
]]> 211003884 Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny novel.

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?

Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part revenge tale, part lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.]]> 304 Ariel Courage 1250360889 Ryan 5 3.76 2025
author: Ariel Courage
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
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]]> 200488133
Han Kang’s Human Acts meets Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police in this understated South Korean novella in a restrained yet emotional magical realist examination of futility in a capitalist society written in response to the 2009 Yongsan Disaster.

In a Seoul slum marked for demolition, residents�� shadows have begun to rise. No one knows how or why–but, they warn each other, do not follow your shadow if it wanders away.

As the landscape of their lives is torn apart, building by building, electronics-repair-shop employees Eungyo and Mujae can only watch as their community begins to fade. Their growing connection with one another provides solace, but against an uncaring ruling class and the inevitability of the rising shadows, their relationship may not be enough.

Winner of the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award and the Korean Bookseller’s Award, One Hundred Shadows is a tender working-class perspective with subtle and affecting social commentary. This edition features an introduction by Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Vegetarian, Han Kang, a historical note about the Yongsan tragedy that inspired One Hundred Shadows, and an exclusive interview with the author.]]> 192 Hwang Jungeun 164566144X Ryan 4 3.29 2010
author: Hwang Jungeun
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
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]]> 215583234
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.

Like a pacifist version of V in V for Vendetta, Gyuok recruits a trio of office allies to carry out plans for minor revenge. Together, these four “rebels�� commit tiny protests against those in more powerful positions through spraying graffiti, throwing eggs, and writing anonymous exposés. But as their attacks increase, the initial joy they felt at the release becomes something more and Jihye and the others will discover the beauty of friendship and the extraordinary power of unity against adversity.��]]> 240 Sohn Won-Pyung 0063378108 Ryan 3 3.61 2017
author: Sohn Won-Pyung
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 213618149 A journalist investigates a seductive and mysterious cult and its leader, an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran, in this not-to-be-missed novel.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War-veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “THERE IS NO GOD BUT THE NAMELESS,�� “ALL SUFFERING IS DISTORTION,�� and “SEE ONLY BEAUTY.�� Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings, compassionate teachings, and closer to Odo. Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come-to-terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo's spell.��

Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a Black infantryman during the Vietnam War, alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless�� clash with a Texan fundamentalist church, O SINNERS! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel What is it that we seek from cults and, inevitably, from each other?]]> 464 Nicole Cuffy 0593597443 Ryan 5 3.59 2025
author: Nicole Cuffy
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 214986256 Against the vibrant, bluesy backdrop of 1970s Austin, Texas, this shimmering debut follows the collision between hicks and hipsters that ultimately results in tragedy.

Austin, Texas is a town in the throes of social upheaval and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them?

Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some ways responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth. Doug Moser, a country-and-blues guitarist from San Antonio, is seizing his long-awaited chance at fame but cannot turn away from the easy booze and drugs that come with the life. Deanna Teague owns Rush Creek. Her marriage is rocky and so is her sense of herself, but she sees a crack of light if she can just hold it all together. And Steven Francis is a boy who loves too fiercely. He grapples with his sexuality, his God, and his place in a town where he badly wants to belong.

In her heartfelt, electrifying rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Collins has captured the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. The embrace of both inertia and danger, the longing for freedom and anarchy even as we crave a place to belong. Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is a time capsule stuffed with heat and booze, electric guitar riffs and big, empty spaces. It’s about the cost of fame—the real price of attention—and what it can do to a person, to a community, to a whole damn town.]]> 240 Callie Collins 0385548842 Ryan 3 3.67
author: Callie Collins
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
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]]> 214986083 A darkly humorous thriller about the ghosts that haunt the temples of excess we call casinos, and the people caught in their high-stakes, low-odds web

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Spoken of only in whispers as “the sandman,�� he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation’s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons�� dreams and preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a midtwenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine’s siren song. Here he falls afoul of the sandman, an encounter he barely escapes through the timely intervention of his cousins Alana and Cherie, who both work at the casino and are intimately aware of the sandman’s power. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino’s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman’s games are in danger of falling into his grasp.

Marion and Alana are members of the Bullhead clan, a family with ties to a sacred past and a fierce determination to ensure their future. Alana, with her sevenfire sight, is the only person to fully understand the danger the sandman poses. Aware of Marion’s occasional ability to navigate the spirit world, she enlists his aid in defeating this wraith. But the power and reach of the sandman go far beyond Alana’s worst fears. Soon she and Marion find themselves in a battle for their lives and for the souls of the reservation’s residents, both the living and the dead.]]> 272 Dennis E. Staples 1640096884 Ryan 3 3.28
author: Dennis E. Staples
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.28
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> 215537039 The Bella Vista, is inspired by the piano works of Harold Budd on the album La Bella Vista, and childhood memories of her father’s own improvised piano reveries in their LA apartment.��


For twenty years, Emma has pursued music as her primary medium, evoking dreamy abstraction, exploring textural maximalism, and embracing her own vulnerability with a guitar, a piano, and the sound of her voice. With The Bella Vista, she turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, “the tenderness and brutality of romantic love.�� Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follows a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution then, eventually, to a sort of peace. The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once—to music, to mistakes, to womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.]]> 110 Emma Ruth Rundle 1961884321 Ryan 5 3.86
author: Emma Ruth Rundle
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 214537790 From��Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling��author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples�� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Ryan 5 4.02 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Ryan 5 4.27 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 215003803 From critically acclaimed author Jon Bassoff, The Memory Ward is a haunting Russian doll of a novel about one man’s attempt to discover what’s real and what isn’t ��

They say it’s always beautiful in Bethlam, Nevada. No place you’d rather live. The people are friendly, if a little nosy, and there’s no crime to speak of. Life is pretty perfect.

But postal worker Hank Davies has started to suspect something is off in this idyllic little town. And he’s certain of that when he realizes the letters he’s been delivering are just blank pages.

Hank isn’t the only one who’s noticed the oddities in Bethlam. One such person knocks on his window in the middle of the night, urging him to investigate his bedroom wall. When Hank pulls back the wallpaper, he discovers dozens of sheets of paper, full of a story that is either complete madness or unbelievable truth. As he begins looking beyond the veneer of his smiling neighbors and their white picket fences, Hank is drawn further and further into a disturbing new reality ��

Told in Bassoff’s lyrical and evocative style, The Memory Ward is a disquieting page-turner that examines the nature of identity, trauma, and what it means to be human.]]> 256 Jon Bassoff Ryan 3 3.73 2025
author: Jon Bassoff
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 355697
In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war��. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier�� experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.]]> 296 Erich Maria Remarque 0449213943 Ryan 5 4.04 1928
author: Erich Maria Remarque
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 21412400 No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny �� so Miranda July �� readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee �� the selfish, cruel blond bombshell �� who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.]]> 288 Miranda July 1439172560 Ryan 5 3.67 2015
author: Miranda July
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 56648158 How do the living come back to life?��

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.

In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and community bonds as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson, and thinks he is her dead brother come back to life; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.��

In a collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of a Native community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

Burn
In a jar
Get me some medicine
Food for the common cold
In a field of stray caterpillars
The blessing tobacco
Safe harbor
Smokes last
Half-life
Earth, speak
Night of the living rez
The name means thunder]]> 285 Morgan Talty 195353418X Ryan 5 3.89 2022
author: Morgan Talty
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 32441704 Named by The Washington Post as a Notable Work of Fiction in 2017 and by Entertainment Weekly as a Best Debut Novel of 2017
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Ann Patchett on PBS NewsHour, Minnesota Public Radio, Maris Kreizman, and The Morning News

National Book Foundation ��5 Under 35�� Honoree

Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

A luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track; perfect for readers of Lab Girl and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You.

Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She’s tormented by her failed research–and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there’s another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can’t make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she’s confronted with a question she won’t find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry–one in which the reactions can’t be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.]]> 224 Weike Wang 1524731749 Ryan 4 3.75 2017
author: Weike Wang
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> 59366097
From the #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Three Women and “our most eloquent and faithful chronicler of human desire�� ( Esquire ), comes an electrifying collection of nine fearless and ferocious short stories.

Behind anonymous screens, an army of cool and beautiful girls manage the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages that promises to spare you the anguish of trying to stay composed while communicating with your crush. At a star-studded political fundraiser in a Los Angeles mansion, a trio of women compete to win the heart of the slick guest of honor. In a tense hospital waiting room, an inseparable pair of hard-partying friends crash into life’s responsibilities, but the magic of their glory days comes alive again at the moment they least expect it.

In these nine riveting stories—which include two Pushcart Prize winners and a finalist for the National Magazine Award—Lisa Taddeo brings to life the fever of obsession, the blindness of love, and the mania of grief. Featuring Taddeo’s arresting prose that continues to thrill her legions of fans, Ghost Lover dares you to look away.]]> 225 Lisa Taddeo 1982122188 Ryan 4 3.26 2022
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 204294822 At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Sometimes in the morning we find her in places. We never see her move. We just come upon her.

Aoileann is cursed. She has no friends, never gone to school. She has never left this windswept craggy isle off the coast of Ireland.

Her mother is cursed: a silent wreck Aoileann calls the “bed-thing.�� Alongside her grandmother, Aoileann’s days are an endless monotony of feeding, changing, and caring for the bed-thing.

Their island seems cursed, whispering secrets only Aoileann hears. Then Rachel, a vivacious artist from the mainland, arrives with her colicky newborn. Rachel arouses yearnings Aoileann cannot fully comprehend. Soon, the unfolding of her mother’s secret tragedy and Aoileann’s pursuit of her own dark desires are both destined to unleash a maelstrom upon all three of their lives.]]> 256 Sophie White 1645661857 Ryan 4 3.67 2022
author: Sophie White
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Ryan 4 3.85
author: Carys Davies
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
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]]> 211934957 A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.

Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers�� secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.

Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .

A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.]]> 352 Brittany Newell 0374613893 Ryan 4 3.62 2025
author: Brittany Newell
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
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]]> 123215035 302 Pierre Lemaitre 9401603634 Ryan 3 3.79 2012
author: Pierre Lemaitre
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2017/03/01
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Ryan 5 3.77 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 156512861 It was raining when I arrived at the house. The walls of my room were lined with cat photos, set in fancy frames just below the ceiling.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with two its resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains.

Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a moving, microscopic examination of loneliness and heartbreak. With flashes of deadpan humour and a keen eye for poignant detail, Aoyama chronicles the painful process of breaking free from the moorings of youth.]]> 160 Nanae Aoyama 152942769X Ryan 4 3.36 2007
author: Nanae Aoyama
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 212808262 An engrossing work of autobiographical fiction about the relationship between an actress daughter and her larger-than-life father—the astonishingly assured debut novel of Sonya Walger, actress on Lost, For All Mankind, and more.

Lion, as his friends call him, is an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter’s life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina’s greatest earthquake,��Lion��is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.

“It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child,�� his daughter writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos, her, by turns, loving, maddening, and magnetic father.��

Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.

Sonya Walger’s stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.]]> 176 Sonya Walger 1681379031 Ryan 5 4.44 2025
author: Sonya Walger
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 211003837 For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel—she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.

Spanning decades, from the ski slopes of rural Colorado to the streets of post-9/11 New York City and back again, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness.]]> 320 Kristin Koval 1250342996 Ryan 4 3.68 2025
author: Kristin Koval
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
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]]> 211708771 Shotgun Lovesongs comes an exquisitely written, small-town story about one couple's hard-won second chance at love, forty years after their divorce.

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he's not sure what he'll find. He is sure of one thing -- he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past. But forty years is a long time. It's forty years of other relationships, forty years of building new lives, and forty years of long-held regrets, mistakes, and painful secrets.

A brave and triumphant exploration of redemption and sunset triumph, A Forty Year Kiss is a once-in-a-lifetime love story, written with dazzling lyricism and remarkable clarity of spirit, from a celebrated author at the top of his game. It's a literary valentine that promises to be a love story for the ages.]]> 352 Nickolas Butler 1464221243 Ryan 4 3.54 2025
author: Nickolas Butler
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
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]]> 211642069 For fans of��The Goldfinch��and��Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, an ambitious and absorbing debut that follows three generations of women from New York to rural Ireland and back again.

New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. When a letter arrives from an aunt she didn’t know existed in Ireland with the offer of a new life, the name jogs a an old videocassette game Cora used to play as a child where two sisters must save the students of a mysterious boarding school.

County Donegal, 1974. An eclectic group of artists known as the Screamers arrives in Burtonport and moves into the old schoolhouse down the road from where Roisin lives with her older sister Moira. Alternately kind and cruel, brilliant artist Moira is a mystery to Roisin, as is Moira’s relationship with the boy next door, Michael. When the Screamers look to hire an artist in residence, Roisin enlists Michael’s help to get Moira the job, setting in motion a chain of events that will put an ocean between the sisters and threaten to tear them apart forever.

Burtonport, 2018. Lyca Brady lives in a sprawling old house with her mother, Cora, and great aunt, Ro. Abortion has just been legalized in Ireland, and Lyca is struggling to find herself outside her mother’s activism. An unexpected message from a childhood friend sends Lyca searching her house’s mysterious attic, with its strange collection of old medical equipment, piles of paperwork, and dusty boxes of ancient video games. There, she unearths secrets hidden for decades—secrets perhaps better left unknown.

Catherine Airey’s haunting debut spins a mesmerizing story of family and fate, survival and revelation, examining the irresistible gravity of the past—how it endures through generations, pervasively present even when buried or forgotten.


]]> 480 Catherine Airey 0063380137 Ryan 5 3.82 2025
author: Catherine Airey
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> 14276 135 William Maxwell 1860464181 Ryan 0 to-read 3.91 1980
author: William Maxwell
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211178725 The woman never goes by the same name.
She never stays in the same place too long.
She never ages. She never dies.
But those around her do.

When two grieving strangers meet by chance in Osaka airport they uncover a disturbing connection. Jake's best friend and Mariko's twin brother each died, 6,000 miles apart, in brutal and unfathomable circumstances.

Each encountered a mesmerising, dark-haired woman in the days before their deaths. A woman who came looking for Mariko - and then disappeared.

Jake, who has carried his loss and guilt for a decade, finds himself compelled to follow the trail set by Mariko's revelations. It's a trail that weaves across continents and centuries, leading back to the many who have died - in strange and terrifying and eerily similar ways - and those they left behind: bewildered, disbelieved, yet resolutely sure of what they saw.

And, at the centre of it all, there is the same beguiling woman. Her name may have changed, but her purpose has never wavered, and as Jake races to discover who, or what she is, she has already made her next choice.

But will knowing her secret be enough to stop her?]]> 352 Susan Barker 0593718291 Ryan 4 3.77 2025
author: Susan Barker
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves:
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]]> 209823382
Poe Webb, host of a popular true crime podcast, invites people to anonymously confess crimes they've committed to her audience. She can't guarantee the police won't come after her "guests," but her show grants simultaneous anonymity and instant fame—a potent combination that's proven difficult to resist. After an episode recording, Poe usually erases both criminal and crime from her mind.

But when a strange and oddly familiar man appears on her show, Poe is forced to take a second look. Not only because he claims to be her mother's murderer from years ago, but because Poe knows something no one else does. Her mother's murderer is dead.

Poe killed him.

From the USA Today bestselling author of The Dead Girl in 2A and The New Neighbor comes a chilling new thriller that forces the question: are murderers always the bad guys?]]> 420 Carter Wilson 1464226229 Ryan 4 3.77 2025
author: Carter Wilson
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
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]]> 34788286 A Lesser Love presents poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, and even national citizens. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of jeong permeates this collection as each poem draws astonishing connections and illuminates the bonds that hold across time and place.

With evocative lyricism, Koh mixes the languages of science and emotion to compose some poems like chemistry equations that convert light into "reasonable dioxide" and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. Through this alchemy the poet allows readers to see through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers: we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, the hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. Demonstrating an ability to elicit profound emotional intensity, Koh crafts a book of poems that challenge, delight, and enrich.]]> 80 E.J. Koh 0807167770 Ryan 5 4.22 2017
author: E.J. Koh
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Ryan 5 3.72 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
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]]> 211399769
Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia.

Lia's life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn't have time for anyone - not even herself.

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of a strange constellation of men - Téo, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.]]> 304 Tom Lamont 0593803248 Ryan 5 3.76 2024
author: Tom Lamont
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
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]]> 211025449
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.

But when Ruth’s loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they’ve created together comes to a crisis. As Ruth struggles with her crumbling independence, Abe must learn how to take care of her while their three living children question his ability to look after his wife. And once again, the couple has to reconfigure how to be there for each other.

In this bighearted and profound portrait of a marriage, Jonathan Evison explores seventy years of big moments in subtle ways, elegantly braiding the Winters�� turbulent history with their present-day battles, showing us how the oddly paired college kids became parents, fell apart and back together, andgrew into the Abe and Ruth of today. Endlessly heartwarming and moving, The Heart of Winter is a reminder that true love lives in small, everyday moments.]]> 368 Jonathan Evison 059347354X Ryan 5 4.09 2025
author: Jonathan Evison
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 208584952 From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,�� says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign�� wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular�� style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron�� (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.]]> 224 Weike Wang 0593545540 Ryan 5 3.30 2024
author: Weike Wang
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
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]]> 203579122 336 Niamh Mulvey 1529079853 Ryan 4 3.88 2024
author: Niamh Mulvey
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 208430621
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.]]> 224 Charles Baxter 0593700856 Ryan 5 3.07 2024
author: Charles Baxter
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
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]]> 205900986 A postapocalyptic road trip and a quest for redemption.

The world has been ravaged by a lethal virus and, with few exceptions, only the young have survived. Cities and infrastructures have been destroyed, and the natural world has reclaimed the landscape in surprising ways, with herds of wild camels roaming the American West and crocodiles that glow neon green lurking in the rivers.

Against this perilous backdrop, Will Collins, the de facto caretaker of a Buddhist monastery in Colorado, receives an urgent and mysterious request: to deliver a potential cure to a scientist in what was once California. So Will sets out, haunted by dreams of the woman he once loved, in a rusted-out pickup pulled by two mules. A menacing thug is on his tail. Armed militias patrol the roads. And the only way he’ll make it is with the help of a clever raven, an opinionated cat, and a tough teenage girl who has learned to survive on her own.

A highly original contribution to the canon of dystopian literature, The Way is a thrilling and imaginative novel, full of warmth, wisdom, and surprises that reflect our world in unsettling, uncanny, and even hopeful ways.]]> 304 Cary Groner 1954118422 Ryan 4 3.78 2024
author: Cary Groner
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
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]]> 210331628 A suspenseful, satirical dark comedy about a struggling writer who wakes up to find his date from the night before dead—and must then decide how far he’s willing to go to spin the misadventure into his next big book.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

The issue is, good ideas are hard to come by, and the mounting pressure of a near-empty bank account isn’t helping. But when David connects with a sexy stranger on a dating app, he figures a wild night out in New York City may be just what he needs to find inspiration. Lucky for him, his date turns out to be handsome, confident, and wealthy, not to mention the perfect distraction from yet another evening staring at a blank screen.

After one of the best nights of his life, David wakes up hungover but giddy—only to find prince charming dead next to him in bed. Horrified, completely confused, and suddenly faced with the implausible-but-somehow-plausible idea that he may have actually killed his date, David calls the only person he can trust in a moment of crisis: his literary agent, Stacey.

Together, David and Stacey must untangle the events of the previous night, cover their tracks, and spin the entire misadventure into David’s career-defining novel—if only they can figure out what to do with the body first.]]> 329 Daniel Aleman 1538766345 Ryan 4 3.60 2024
author: Daniel Aleman
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves:
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]]> 197239494
It's 2014 in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, where the Prophet—a 70-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local dump, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael and the Prophet feels certain that she is his Big Fish, a messenger sent by God to take his apocalyptic warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.

Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.]]> 269 Jamie Quatro 0802163130 Ryan 5 3.76 2024
author: Jamie Quatro
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves:
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]]> 203164471 A richly imagined, sweeping novel set in the climate-changed world of our own descendants, by the acclaimed author of WHISKEY WHEN WE’RE DRY.

A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people.

Down the coast, raiders deliver the children's mother, along with the rest of their human cargo, to the last port city of a waning empire. Determined to reunite with her family, she plots her escape—while her fellow captives plan open revolt.

At the center of power in this crumbling city, a young scholar inherits his father's business and position of privilege, along with the burden of his debts. As the empire's elite prepare to flee to new utopia across the sea, he must decide where his allegiance lies.

With a rapidly changing climate shifting the sands beneath their feet, these three paths converge in a struggle for the future of humanity—who will inherit what remains and who gets to tell its story. At once a sweeping survival story; an epic of the distance future; and a post-apocalyptic vision of hope and optimism, THE ANCIENTS weaves a multilayered narrative about human resilience, hope, and stewardship of our world for future generations.]]> 400 John Larison 0593831160 Ryan 5 3.77 2024
author: John Larison
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves:
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]]> 205438896 A grieving mother and son hope to survive Christmas in a remote mountain cabin, in this chilling novella of dread, isolation and demons lurking in the frozen woods. Perfect for fans of The Only Good Indians, The Shining and The Babadook.

Two weeks ago, Christine Sinclaire's husband slipped off the roof while hanging Christmas lights and fell to his death on the front lawn. Desperate to escape her guilt and her grief, Christine packs up her fifteen-year-old son and the family cat and flees to the cabin they'd reserved deep in the remote Pennsylvania Wilds to wait out the holidays.

It isn't long before Christine begins to hear strange noises coming from the forest. When she spots a horned figure watching from between frozen branches, Christine assumes it's just a forest animal—a moose, maybe, since the property manager warned her about them, said they'd stomp a body so deep into the snow nobody'd find it 'til spring. But moose don't walk upright like the shadowy figure does. They don't call Christine's name with her dead husband's voice.

A haunting examination of the horrors of grief and the hunger of guilt, perfect for readers of Stephen King, Christina Henry, and Chuck Wendig.]]> 128 Lindy Ryan 1835410081 Ryan 3 2.55 2024
author: Lindy Ryan
name: Ryan
average rating: 2.55
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
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]]> 207299641 From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a dark, satirical parable about a string of mysterious high school disappearances, the seedy underbellies of billionaires, and the tough choices we make in the face of an uncertain future. In Shock Induction, the best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called “Greener Pastures.�� It’s here, in Greener Pastures, that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades, and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labor sounds like a pretty fair deal—doesn’t it? In a high school only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine, students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite—but how much of a choice do they truly have?]]> 240 Chuck Palahniuk 1668021447 Ryan 4 3.15 2024
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 207293815 In this exquisite speculative novel set in a world where white people no longer exist, college professor Charlie Brunton receives a call from his estranged daughter Sidney, setting off a chain of events as they journey across a truly “post-racial�� America in search of answers.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

When they enter the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.]]> 304 Cebo Campbell 1668034921 Ryan 5 3.82 2024
author: Cebo Campbell
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves:
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]]> 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.�� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Ryan 4 3.75 2017
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 203578770 Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.

Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.

One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.]]> 144 M.L. Rio 1250356792 Ryan 4 3.18 2024
author: M.L. Rio
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
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]]> 207003507 Bullet Train’s hapless underworld operative and his handler are back in this thrilling new novel from internationally bestselling author Kotaro Isaka.

In Bullet Train, underworld operative Ladybird was tasked by his handler Maria Beetle with retrieving a suitcase from a high-speed train in Japan. The job did not go according to plan, to the delight of millions of readers and movie fans around the world.

Will the unluckiest assassin in the world will find things easier this time around? All he has to do is deliver a painting to a hotel guest, a portrait made by his daughter. Easy enough, except when Ladybird makes the delivery, he realizes that the guest is clearly not the guy in the painting. Then he attacks Ladybird, they fight, and the guest ends up dead. How can such simple jobs always go wrong?

Internationally acclaimed author Kotaro Isaka spins another outrageously entertaining thriller in Hotel Lucky Seven. This is a stylish, masterful book, again featuring outsized characters, gripping action, plot twists, and surprise identities.]]> 304 Kōtarō Isaka 1419777033 Ryan 4 3.94 2023
author: Kōtarō Isaka
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves:
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]]> 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 Ryan 5 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
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]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Ryan 5 3.72 2023
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Ryan 5 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Ryan 4 3.34 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 198281740
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…��

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.]]> 324 Matt Haig 0593489276 Ryan 4 3.45 2024
author: Matt Haig
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
4.5 starts. A fun, heartwarming story.
]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Ryan 5 3.31 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 9679442 272 Manuel Muñoz 1565125339 Ryan 4 3.48 2011
author: Manuel Muñoz
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 167067538
For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the infrastructural power failure that brought about governmental and societal collapse. Hunters and harvesters, they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.
Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a dangerous mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their ancestral home, the “land where the birch trees grow by the big water�� in the Great Lakes region.

Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, a great archer and hunter, Evan begins a journey that will take him through the reserve where the Anishinaabe were once settled, the devastated city of Gibson, and a land now being reclaimed by nature. But it isn’t just the wilderness that poses a threat as they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land. And those who use violence to fulfill their needs. . .]]> 307 Waubgeshig Rice 0358673259 Ryan 4 4.22 2023
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 195790677
The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.]]> 320 Kailee Pedersen 1250328241 Ryan 4 3.33 2024
author: Kailee Pedersen
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 36423133 I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon... I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with the beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth - a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

The four uncanny and terrifying tales contained between these covers are all linked by their reference to a certain notorious play, a cursed, forbidden play that has spread like a contagion across the world, a play in which the second act reveals truths so terrible, and so beautiful, that it drives all who read it to lunatic despair: The King in Yellow.

These stories are some of the most thrilling ever written in the field of weird fiction. Since their first publication in 1895 they have become cult classics, influencing many writers from the renowned master of cosmic horror H. P. Lovecraft to the creators of HBO's True Detective.

Contains: ‘The Repairer of Reputations��, ‘The Mask��, ‘In the Court of the Dragon��, ‘The Yellow Sign’]]> 160 Robert W. Chambers 178227376X Ryan 4 3.78 1895
author: Robert W. Chambers
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1895
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 6049376 A Separate Peace, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha �� John the Revelator grapples with the pull of the world and the hold of those we love. Suffused with family secrets, eerie imagery, black humor, and hypnotic prose, John the Revelator is a novel to fall in love with and an astounding debut.]]> 272 Peter Murphy 0151014027 Ryan 5 3.04 2009
author: Peter Murphy
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 195790571
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.

They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.

Now, our daughters take up arms.

Galva �� Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill �� has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.

The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted �� not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.]]> 416 Christopher Buehlman 1250887674 Ryan 5 4.23 2024
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves:
review:

]]> 202102049 From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel’s end. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her German grandmother’s experience of the second world war, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 282 Yōko Ogawa 0593316088 Ryan 5 3.74 2006
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,�� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights�� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Ryan 5 3.49 2024
author: Helen Phillips
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/23
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 201626947 Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end.

In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street.

Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them.

Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.]]> 224 Anna DeForest 0316567124 Ryan 5 3.60 2024
author: Anna DeForest
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 202102018 From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence

Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital.

But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men—secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell—as they seek a path to safety. Then, a startling discovery drastically alters their path and the stakes of their escape.

Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families.]]> 291 Peter Heller 0593801628 Ryan 5 3.51 2024
author: Peter Heller
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Ryan 5 3.77 2024
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
review:
Everything about this book, the sentences, the characters, the scenes, went in directions I didn’t anticipate and I’m grateful for that. An excellent novel.
]]> 57629 Half Roundel

I make no prayer
For the spoilt season,
The weed of Eden.
I make no prayer.
Save us the green
In the weed of time.

Now is November;
In night uneasy
Nothing I say.
I make no prayer.
Save us from the water
That washes us away.

What do I ponder?
All smiled disguise,
Lights in cold places,
I make no prayer.
Save us from air
That wears us loosely.

The leaf of summer
To cold has come
In little time.
I make no prayer.
From earth deliver
And the dark therein.

Now is no whisper
Through all the living.
I speak to nothing.
I make no prayer.
Save us from fire
Consuming up and down.

Evening with Lee Shore and Cliffs

Sea-shimmer, faint haze, and far out a bird
Dipping for flies or fish. Then, when over
That wide silk suddenly the shadow
Spread skating, who turned with a shiver
High in the rocks? And knew, then only, the waves'
Layering patience: how they would follow after,
After, dogged as sleep, to his inland
Dreams, oh beyond the one lamb that cried
In the olives, past the pines' derision. And heard
Behind him not the sea's gaiety but its laughter.

The Fishermen

When you think how big their feet are in black rubber
And it slippery underfoot always, it is clever
How they thread and manage among the sprawled nets, lines,
Hooks, spidery cages with small entrances.
But they are used to it. We do not know their names.
They know our needs, and live by them, lending them wiles
And beguilements we could never have fashioned for them;
They carry the ends of our hungers out to drop them
To wait swaying in a dark place we could never have chosen.
By motions we have never learned they feed us.
We lay wreaths on the sea when it has drowned them.]]> 256 W.S. Merwin 155659139X Ryan 3 4.04 1975
author: W.S. Merwin
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 181037605 In this searing debut novel, for readers of Katie Kitamura and Rachel Cusk, the tragic aftermath of a youthful relationship years after its end brings the life of a mourning woman in New York--and the pursuit of art--into stark relief.

Told in short passages through a musical device, this international story follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere.

Julienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. The reverberations of grief force Julienne to confront her painful past including the mystery of her own birth and the fantastical story ascribed to it by her flight attendant mother, so that she can envision, for the first time, a real future.

Ultimately, Thieving Sun is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, grief, debt, suicide loss and the danger of being alive.]]> 224 Monica Datta 166260257X Ryan 4 4.25 2024
author: Monica Datta
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 59733272 82 Kimberly Johnson 0892555599 Ryan 5 4.32
author: Kimberly Johnson
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 5998868 73 Joy Harjo 039333421X Ryan 4 4.20 1982
author: Joy Harjo
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 201632456
In this masterpiece of mid-century Japanese fiction, Inoue weaves together conflicting perspectives to tell a single story of love, death, truth and longing.]]> 112 Yasushi Inoue 180533039X Ryan 4 3.91 1949
author: Yasushi Inoue
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 58724997
Kinch Na Shannack owes the Takers Guild a small fortune for his education as a thief, which includes (but is not limited to) lock-picking, knife-fighting, wall-scaling, fall-breaking, lie-weaving, trap-making, plus a few small magics. His debt has driven him to lie in wait by the old forest road, planning to rob the next traveler that crosses his path.

But today, Kinch Na Shannack has picked the wrong mark.

Galva is a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and handmaiden of the goddess of death. She is searching for her queen, missing since a distant northern city fell to giants.

Unsuccessful in his robbery and lucky to escape with his life, Kinch now finds his fate entangled with Galva's. Common enemies and uncommon dangers force thief and knight on an epic journey where goblins hunger for human flesh, krakens hunt in dark waters, and honor is a luxury few can afford.

�� The Blacktongue Thief is fast and fun and filled with crazy magic. I can't wait to see what Christopher Buehlman does next." - Brent Weeks, New York Times bestselling author of the Lightbringer series]]> 416 Christopher Buehlman 125079997X Ryan 5 4.23 2021
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 39082248
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.]]> 213 Waubgeshig Rice 1770414002 Ryan 4 3.83 2018
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/31
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 359037 69 Kimberly Johnson 0892552824 Ryan 5 4.37 2002
author: Kimberly Johnson
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 61774690
Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and '80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ling Ma’s Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters —Bo, Brandon and Blue�� who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.

* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.

* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.

* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television exposé of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.

Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?]]> 341 Jinwoo Chong 1685890342 Ryan 5 3.33 2023
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,�� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box
��
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s��Mommy,��Daddo,��and Grandma Ruth.��But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”����
��
When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.��
��
Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.����
��
But Other Mommy needs an answer.��
��
Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]> 367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Ryan 5 3.61 2024
author: Josh Malerman
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

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

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Ryan 5 3.79 2024
author: Kevin Barry
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 195790688
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern―something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.

During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s Florida Diary is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 037461220X Ryan 5 3.41 2024
author: Laura van den Berg
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 46195204 The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.

As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? Eun Ji Koh fearlessly grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma, arriving at insights that are essential reading for anyone who has ever had to balance love, longing, heartbreak, and joy.

The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice.]]> 209 E.J. Koh 1947793381 Ryan 5 3.86 2020
author: E.J. Koh
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 36874959
In the second story, a woman living in a damp flat obsesses on the filthy state of her dwelling. She remains in bed for the duration of the narrative, but the drama and tension of her inner life - spiralling further and further into her memories and anxieties.]]> 122 Toshiki Okada 1782274162 Ryan 3 2.88 2007
author: Toshiki Okada
name: Ryan
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 199844048 208 Rokudo Ningen 1975379586 Ryan 5 3.52 2022
author: Rokudo Ningen
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 197789783
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another]]> 243 Morgan Talty 1959030558 Ryan 5 3.71 2024
author: Morgan Talty
name: Ryan
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 13543121
Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.]]> 432 Christopher Buehlman 1937007863 Ryan 5 4.20 2012
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Ryan
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
review:

]]>