zainzsz's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 02 Apr 2025 06:25:48 -0700 60 zainzsz's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

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

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

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

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

This is “one of our most gifted writers� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 zainzsz 0 currently-reading 3.94 2024 Our Evenings
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 zainzsz 3 4.68 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X zainzsz 0 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> The Quiet Violence of Dreams 545316
The Quiet Violence of Dreams is set in Cape Town's cosmopolitan neighbourhoods - Observatory, Mowbray and Sea Point - where subcultures thrive and alternative lifestyles are tolerated. The plot revolves around Tshepo, a student at Rhodes, who gets confined to a Cape Town mental institution after an episode of 'cannabis-induced psychosis'. He escapes but is returned to the hospital and completes his rehabilitation, earns his release - and promptly terminates his studies. He now works as a waiter and shares an apartment with a newly released prisoner. The relationship with his flatmate deteriorates and Tshepo loses his job at the Waterfront. Desperate for an income, he finds work at a male massage parlour, using the pseudonym Angelo.

The novel explores Tshepo-Angelo's coming to consciousness of his sexuality, sexual orientation, and place in the world. lifestyle and set of experiences are explored - that of a young black woman who gets involved with a disabled German student who does not want to commit to marriage, despite Mmabatho's unplanned pregnancy.]]> 460 K. Sello Duiker 0795701209 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.35 2002 The Quiet Violence of Dreams
author: K. Sello Duiker
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> Small Rain 205363938 A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.]]> 306 Garth Greenwell 0374279543 zainzsz 4 4.06 2024 Small Rain
author: Garth Greenwell
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk zainzsz 0 to-read 3.93 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 zainzsz 3 4.17 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> Open Throat 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,� our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.�

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.� As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X zainzsz 0 to-read 4.02 2023 Open Throat
author: Henry Hoke
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Flights 36885304 Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Here I am --
World in your head --
Your head in the world --
Syndrome --
Cabinet of curiosities --
Seeing is knowing --
Seven years of trips --
Guidance from Cioran --
Kunicki: water (I) --
Benedictus, quivenit]]> 416 Olga Tokarczuk 0525534199 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.73 2007 Flights
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End]]> 20696006 In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.]]> 282 Atul Gawande 0805095152 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.47 2014 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
author: Atul Gawande
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna zainzsz 0 to-read 3.54 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Year of Magical Thinking 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 zainzsz 5 3.94 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking
author: Joan Didion
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now]]> 40603783 not the new twenty. In this enlightening book, Dr. Meg Jay reveals how many twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation that has trivialized what are actually the most defining years of adulthood. Drawing from more than ten years of work with hundreds of twentysomething clients and students, Dr. Jay weaves the science of the twentysomething years with compelling, behind-closed-doors stories from twentysomethings themselves. She shares what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, reproductive specialists, human resources executives, and economists know about the unique power of our twenties and how they change our lives. The result is a provocative and sometimes poignant read that shows us why our twenties do matter. Our twenties are a time when the things we do--and the things we don't do--will have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.]]> 273 Meg Jay zainzsz 0 4.09 2012 The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now
author: Meg Jay
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 zainzsz 0 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
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]]> Alec 55320930 William di Canzio’s Alec, inspired by Maurice, E. M. Forster’s secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster’s classic, published only after the author's death.Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec—a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.Alec continues Forster’s project of telling stories that are part of “a great unrecorded history.� Di Canzio’s debut novel is a love story of epic proportions, at once classic and boldly new.]]> 352 William di Canzio 0374722463 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.43 2021 Alec
author: William di Canzio
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> Queer 23942 160 William S. Burroughs 0330300164 zainzsz 0 3.57 1985 Queer
author: William S. Burroughs
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
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]]> Cursed Bread 59823055
Still reeling in the aftermath of the deadliest war the world had ever seen, the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. Some historians believe the mysterious illness and violent hallucinations were caused by spoiled bread; others claim it was the result of covert government testing on the local population.
In that town lived a woman named Elodie. She was the baker’s wife: a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, the forceful ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet, Elodie was quickly drawn into their orbit. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse � but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory’s hall of mirrors, and an erotic fable of transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.]]> 184 Sophie Mackintosh 0385548311 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.27 2023 Cursed Bread
author: Sophie Mackintosh
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake]]> 207003966 A blazing new talent’s hilarious memoir about coming of age and coming out in Pakistan, moving to America, looking for love, and falling in love with himself along the way.

I’m just a man, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cake.

What do you do when you’re too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and you’re ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are?

Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or bullied for their “manboobs,� or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid.

Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post-9/11 world and society’s rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket.

Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, that there are people and places he’d need to let go of to move forward.]]> 272 Komail Aijazuddin 1419773844 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.32 2024 Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake
author: Komail Aijazuddin
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 zainzsz 0 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/15
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review:
Truly did not expect to relate this much to the 45 year old perimenopausal lady but � alas !
]]> Fruit of the Dead 176443312
Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.

Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s own late capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.]]> 320 Rachel Lyon 1668020858 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.50 2024 Fruit of the Dead
author: Rachel Lyon
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> Her Side of the Story 123220515 From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.�

As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.�

Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.

In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.

In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy]]> 500 Alba de Céspedes 1662601433 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.18 1949 Her Side of the Story
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> Honey 195790655 A coming-of-age story that follows the meteoric rise of singer Amber Young as she navigates fame in the late-1990s and early-2000s era of pop music superstardom

It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It is a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA.

As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, her rich interior life is frequently reduced. Surrounded by people who claim to love her but only wish to exploit her, and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connection, Amber comes of age at a time when the kaleidoscope of public opinion can distort everything and one mistake can shatter a career.

Isabel Banta’s debut novel redefines the narratives of some of the most famous pop icons of the 1990s and 2000s. It reimagines the superstars we idolized and hated, oversexualized and underestimated, and gives them the fresh, multifaceted story they deserve.]]> 336 Isabel Banta 1250333466 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.44 2024 Honey
author: Isabel Banta
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> The New Life 61273326 Two Victorian marriages, two dangerous love affairs, one extraordinary partnership . . .

London, 1894. After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John Addington, married to Catherine, has met Frank, a working-class printer.

Meanwhile Henry Ellis's wife Edith has fallen in love with Angelica - and Angelica wants Edith all to herself.

When in 1894 John and Henry decide to write a revolutionary book together, intended to challenge convention and the law, they are both caught in relationships stalked by guilt and shame. Yet they share a vision of a better world, one that will expand possibilities for men and women everywhere.

Their daring book threatens to throw John and Henry, and all those around them, into danger. How far should they go to win personal freedoms? And how high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living?]]> 392 Tom Crewe 1668000830 zainzsz 4 3.71 2023 The New Life
author: Tom Crewe
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
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]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter
author: Elena Ferrante
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> The Sluts 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.79 2004 The Sluts
author: Dennis Cooper
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> <![CDATA[300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World]]> 123938160
For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world has either been ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few narratives are widely the wild romance of Achilles and Patroclus; the yearning love of Sappho's lyrics; and the three genders introduced in Plato's Symposium . Yet there is a rich literary tradition of queer Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond the prudish translations of these familiar handful of stories.

In 300,000ÌýKisses , award-winning poet Seán Hewitt and renowned designer Luke Edward Hall collect these stories—including some of the most beautiful and moving in the classical canon—and bring them to vivid life. Alongside celebrated works by Homer, Sappho, Ovid and Catullus, they include a wide range of rarely anthologized raunchy poems, thoughtful dialogues, philosophical treatises, and even a graffiti text salvaged from the ruins of Pompeii.

Through Hewitt's contemporary translations and Hall's vibrant illustrations, we encounter relationships that are by turns heartfelt and nourishing, unrequited and lustful, toxic and crude, tender and fulfilling. A groundbreaking anthology that seeks to change the way we see the ancient world, 300,000 Kisses is a fascinating journey through love in all its forms.]]> 208 Seán Hewitt 0593582446 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.80 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World
author: Seán Hewitt
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> Brat 198563713 From a provocative new literary talent, a hilarious and haunted novel featuring an unlikable protagonist grappling with grief, inheritance, and the ghosts of his past

We meet our ill-tempered protagonist—the story’s titular “bratâ€â€”at a low moment, but not yet at rock bottom. The Gabriel of the novel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup, and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parentsâ€� house to clear it out for sale. Here, the clichés end.

Gabriel has trouble delivering on his promise as the moldy, overgrown house deteriorates around him, so does his own health, and large sheets of his skin begin to peel from his body at a terrifying rate. In fragments and figments, Gabriel takes us on a surreal journey into the mysteries of the family home, where he finds unfinished manuscripts written by his parents which seem to mutate every time he picks them up, and a bizarre home video that hints at long-buried secrets.

Strange people and figures emerge—perhaps directly from the novel’s embedded fictions—and despite his compromised state (and his more successful brother’s growing frustration) Gabriel is determined to try to make sense of these hauntings. Part ghost story, part grief story; flirting with the autofictional mode while sitting squarely in the tradition of the gothic, Brat crackles with deadpan humor and delightfully taut prose.

Smith’s arrival heralds the next generation of fiction writers—formally inventive, influenced by the rhythms of the internet, and infused with a particularly Gen Z sense of alienation. Irreverent and boundary-pushing, but not for its own sake, the novel that follows is muscular yet lyrical, riddled with paradox, and told with a truly rare and compelling clarity of voice. Brat is a serious debut that refuses to take itself too seriously.]]> 320 Gabriel Smith 0593656873 zainzsz 3 3.45 2024 Brat
author: Gabriel Smith
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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I liked it, I thought it took an interesting approach to grief, and most of the surreal aspects of the novel worked for me � I did however think the writing could use some work � too many contemporary novels are taking on this stilted/flat prose which makes the work as a whole less engaging
]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 zainzsz 0 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
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]]> Table for Two 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/23
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]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

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

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

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> Housemates 198137722 Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?


When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie's former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the aritsts into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide countryâ€â€”as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to to pursue their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.]]> 352 Emma Copley Eisenberg 0593242238 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.52 2024 Housemates
author: Emma Copley Eisenberg
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/23
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]]> The Coin 199349912 A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

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

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

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.]]> 240 Yasmin Zaher 1646222105 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.51 2024 The Coin
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> Writers & Lovers 45289222 Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.]]> 320 Lily King zainzsz 0 to-read 3.98 2020 Writers & Lovers
author: Lily King
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity]]> 199392896 Journalist and former Allure editor Sable Yong debuts with a sharp-toothed and hilarious essay collection about beauty and vanity, examining their stigmatization in the cultural zeitgeist, and how to shift the focus to use both for powerful tools for self-exploration, interpersonal connection, and cultural change.

The beauty industry has a single mandate: be hot.

In the same week that you might be encouraged to try curtain bangs, contouring, bleached eyebrows, laser facials, buccal fat removal, fillers, and “non-invasive� facelifts, you’re simultaneously absorbing mantras about self-care, body positivity, empowerment, and loving yourself just as you are.

Overwhelmed yet?

Fear not. Die Hot with a Vengeance delves into the machinations of this multi-billion-dollar industry, offering readers an expert analysis of its inner workings with the precision of a scalpel and the humor of a stand-up comedian. Along the way, Yong sets off to answer some of the biggest questions of our time:

How do you break through the noise of beauty and wellness culture’s endless optimization protocols?
How can you find actual authenticity in a world of performative artifice?
Can the antidote to aging be found in a jar, tube, or at the end of a syringe?
Do blondes really have more fun?
Using Yong’s many years of experience as a beauty editor to unlock the industry’s myriad secrets, Die Hot with a Vengeance gives beauty and vanity a neutralizing make-over. At its best, beauty is so much more than an aesthetic; it’s an inspirational mindset. It’s a playfulness inherent to the practice of self-expression.

And yet it’s difficult to engage playfully when it feels like beauty is an ever-moving target. We’re all subject to societal expectations surrounding beauty and vanity, enough so that breaking through the capitalist pressures can feel impossible. Yong argues that while the mandate may be for us to be hot, the beauty industry thrives on us absorbing its teachings so it can keep us in a constant feedback loop of appearance-based anxiety, forever perpetuating unattainable standards. Flipping that imperative, Yong’s debut collection poses the most important question of all: How do you discover your value of beauty so you can free yourself from the loud and bullshitty noise of all these entities telling you that you’re not good enough?

Digging deep into our most pervasive and questionable beauty trends and conventions, Die Hot with a Vengeance offers an incisive yet wry dissection of one of our most enduring cultural addictions. Irreverent, side-splittingly funny, and astute, the book is as amusing as it is insightful, an instant classic for beauty-readers and aspirant hotties alike.]]> 256 Sable Yong 0063236486 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.63 Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity
author: Sable Yong
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.63
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date added: 2024/06/18
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]]> Valide 56803864 Et si notre mutinerie doit réussir, il faut que je nomme bien les choses, sans détour. Sans ça, tu ne dérogeras pas à tes certitudes.
Alors voilà: je suis trans.
Comme dans transgression. J’ai cassé les genres, je me suis soustraite aux codes.
Je suis trans.
Comme dans translation. J’ai fait glisser les éléments qui constituent ma personne d’un état vers un…]]> 272 Chris Bergeron 2897722819 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.52 Valide
author: Chris Bergeron
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/18
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]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 zainzsz 3 3.78 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> Separate Rooms 251535 186 Pier Vittorio Tondelli 1852427779 zainzsz 3 3.86 1989 Separate Rooms
author: Pier Vittorio Tondelli
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
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]]> Penance 75498191 One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023

From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.

Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

But how much of the story is true?

Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.]]> 336 Eliza Clark 0063327856 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Penance
author: Eliza Clark
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 zainzsz 4 4.23 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
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Disjointed at parts, didn’t love the ending, but still really liked it!
]]> Play It As It Lays 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 zainzsz 4 3.94 1970 Play It As It Lays
author: Joan Didion
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
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Ennui, aimless wandering, California in the 70s � classic!
]]> Lithium for Medea 37785 368 Kate Braverman 1583224718 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.97 1981 Lithium for Medea
author: Kate Braverman
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/21
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]]> Sudden Rain 497015
Hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "the Nixon-era precursor to Tom Perrotta's acclaimed novel, Little Children " this is a compelling drama that offers great insight into the nature of marriage -- both then and now.

Now that Sudden Rain has come out of its hiding place -- in Wolff's refrigerator, found after her death -- it remains gloriously frozen in time. Set in the fall of 1972, the novel perfectly captures, with expansive emotion and cinematic detail, the domestic trends of three generations of middle-class couples living in suburban Los Angeles. A brilliant portrait of its burgeoning era, Sudden Rain also offers striking cultural commentary on our everyday notions of love and marriage; individuality, equality, and community; and the promise and pursuit of the American Dream.]]> 448 Maritta Wolff 0743254856 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.47 2005 Sudden Rain
author: Maritta Wolff
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/21
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]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 724 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.06 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity]]> 58169 Where do ideas come from?

In Catching the Big Fish, internationally acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch provides a rare window into his methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish - and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which he works, such as painting, music, and design. Lynch writes for the first time about his more than three-decade commitment to Transcendental Meditation and the difference it has made in his creative process.

In brief chapters, Lynch explains the development of his ideas - where they came from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He specifically discusses how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he considers the self and the surrounding world - and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.]]> 181 David Lynch 1585425400 zainzsz 0 3.78 2006 Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
author: David Lynch
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> Civil Elegies and Other Poems 3281942 57 Dennis Lee 088784023X zainzsz 5 3.80 1972 Civil Elegies and Other Poems
author: Dennis Lee
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/09
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
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]]> Narrow Rooms 545421 A powerful story of love turned round, of passion and fierce discovery, of lives illuminated by flickering violence.

As Purdy spins the story of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between four boys in a remote West Virginia mountain town, led by the seemingly hypnotic power of the one known as "the renderer," the prose itself is rendered by Purdy into spare, ecstatic brilliance, and Narrow Rooms takes on the resonance of any time, any place, of haunted myth, of a tale of horror told in the darkness by generations, and never, never to be forgotten...

—From the first-edition dust jacket.]]> 185 James Purdy 078671669X zainzsz 0 to-read 3.87 1978 Narrow Rooms
author: James Purdy
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> Raven Smith's Men 60890103 Raven Smith's Trivial Pursuits, Raven is back with a pin sharp, hilarious and incisive exploration of what it means to be a man in the modern day.

Part memoir, part commentary on masculinity, Raven Smith's Men isn't so much for men, as about them. Raven has been trying to distill what it is about men that has kept him intrigued his whole life. It boils down to three things. Firstly, he loves them. Secondly, he can see how endlessly problematic they are. Thirdly, both these things converge in his own sense of self and his own masculinity.

This book is about men because, in an annoying way, everything is. We live in a patriarchy, but Raven has no agenda or vendetta. This book is his noticing of particular dynamics, a cautious reverence of a life lived in parallel with other men, observing masculinity's odd amorphous boundaries. He's both curious and terrified of his own participation in the great male privilege and while this book will not shy away from difficult truths, it will also make you laugh an enormous amount!]]> 288 Raven Smith 0008457492 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.66 Raven Smith's Men
author: Raven Smith
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.66
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]> 9717 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.]]> 314 Milan Kundera 0571224385 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.12 1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
author: Milan Kundera
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/21
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]]> One Day 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 zainzsz 2 3.86 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/18
date added: 2024/02/18
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Won’t give any spoilers but there’s a certain trope especially in contemporary romance novels which needs to be done away with � the book itself was alright but the ending was so frustratingly stupid. Also kind of hard to root for them as a couple when Dexter Mayhew is such an unlikeable chatacter � why is she drawn to him exactly again
]]> Children of Paradise 60450976 200 Camilla Grudova 183895631X zainzsz 0 to-read 3.50 2022 Children of Paradise
author: Camilla Grudova
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1: Novels: In My Room, I'm Going Out Tonight, Stronger Than Me]]> 55183930 Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS.

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me (1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.]]> 384 Guillaume Dustan 1635901421 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.19 2013 The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1: Novels: In My Room, I'm Going Out Tonight, Stronger Than Me
author: Guillaume Dustan
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/14
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]]> Naked 4138 Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview—a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing.]]> 304 David Sedaris zainzsz 0 4.10 1997 Naked
author: David Sedaris
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Last Night at the Telegraph Club]]> 35224992 A story of love and duty set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the Red Scare.

“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.� And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?�

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.]]> 409 Malinda Lo 0525555250 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.21 2021 Last Night at the Telegraph Club
author: Malinda Lo
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/25
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]]> The White Album 421 The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0374532079 zainzsz 4 4.06 1979 The White Album
author: Joan Didion
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/16
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]]> Confessions of a Mask 62794 Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be “normal.� Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety.

Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima’s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English―praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood―propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.]]> 224 Yukio Mishima 0720610311 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.02 1949 Confessions of a Mask
author: Yukio Mishima
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> Our Lady of the Flowers 53003 216 Jean Genet 1596541369 zainzsz 0 4.06 1943 Our Lady of the Flowers
author: Jean Genet
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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]]> 100 Boyfriends 53317498 An irreverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero

It's like that saying, 'Where god closes a door, he opens a window, ' but in this particular case the window was on the fifth floor and the house was on fire.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and devastatingly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting--and often losing--the urge to self-sabotage. His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker's husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.

Armed with a deadpan wit that finds humor in even the lowest of nadirs, Brontez Purnell--a widely acclaimed underground writer, filmmaker, musician, and performance artist--writes with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. From dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell indexes desire, desperation, race, and loneliness with a startling blend of levity and vulnerability. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are a singular and uncompromising vision of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.]]> 192 Brontez Purnell 0374538980 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.79 2021 100 Boyfriends
author: Brontez Purnell
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/06
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]]> Where I Was From 423
Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.]]> 240 Joan Didion zainzsz 4 3.87 2003 Where I Was From
author: Joan Didion
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
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Didion is able to parse through the myth of California in a way no one else truly can � while her other novels (Bethlehem, The White Album) delve into this it’s never more present than it is here. Insightful, meditative, and incisive as always
]]> Chilean Poet 58492105 A writer of “startling talent� (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family

After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family—a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.

Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions—in Gonzalo’s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets—not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru’s research leads her into this eccentric community—another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other?

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments—sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound—that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships—a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend—it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.]]> 358 Alejandro Zambra 0593297946 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.07 2020 Chilean Poet
author: Alejandro Zambra
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/31
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]]> Slouching Towards Bethlehem 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion zainzsz 0 4.20 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
author: Joan Didion
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/22
date added: 2023/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Matthias Brunner: Magnificent Obsessions Saved My Life]]> 75602558 450 Matthias Brunner 3907236424 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.67 Matthias Brunner: Magnificent Obsessions Saved My Life
author: Matthias Brunner
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.67
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date added: 2023/12/23
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]]> Eve's Hollywood 2687519 Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to beÌýa razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album ofÌý vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wastelandâ€� is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.Ìý]]> 296 Eve Babitz 0440023394 zainzsz 5 3.92 1974 Eve's Hollywood
author: Eve Babitz
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/16
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]]> <![CDATA[You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again]]> 472032 The Sting. She went on to work with two of the hottest young directorial talents of the era: Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Phillips blazed a trail as one of the very few females to break into the upper echelons of a notoriously chauvinistic industry.

But for all her success, Phillips remained an outsider in the all-male Hollywood club. She had a talent for deal-making, hard-balling and wise-cracking, and a considerable appetite for drink, drugs, and sex. But while these predilections were tolerated and even encouraged among 'the boys', Phillips found herself gradually ostracized. By the late 1980s, she was ready to burn bridges and name names, and the result was this coruscating memoir of her career.

Julia Phillips died on January 1, 2002, at the age of 57, but her book will stand as one of the classic exposes of La-La-Land in all its excesses and iniquities.]]> 596 Julia Phillips 0571216234 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.45 1991 You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
author: Julia Phillips
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1991
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]]> Paint it Black 33144 As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need.
With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence.]]> 387 Janet Fitch 0316182745 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.50 2006 Paint it Black
author: Janet Fitch
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.]]> 38532113
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.]]> 288 Lili Anolik 1501125796 zainzsz 0 3.58 2019 Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
author: Lili Anolik
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/29
date added: 2023/11/29
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]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

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

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

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)]]> 51901147
The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.]]> 541 Suzanne Collins zainzsz 3 3.99 2020 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/17
date added: 2023/11/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hundred Years� War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917�2017]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 zainzsz 5 4.50 2020 The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/14
date added: 2023/11/14
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]]> The House on Via Gemito 63283383 Available in English for the first time, this extraordinary prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone’s reputation as one of Italy’s greatest living writers. Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, and author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling Ties and Trust, goes beyond the slim, succinct novella-length works by which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.

Narrated against the background of Naples, which itself becomes a living character in this lush, atmospheric novel, and steeped in the city’s language and imagery, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a makeshift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If it weren’t for the family he has to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment.

It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.]]> 480 Domenico Starnone 1609459253 zainzsz 4 3.64 2000 The House on Via Gemito
author: Domenico Starnone
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
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]]> A Walk Through Paris 36424560 272 Eric Hazan 1786632586 zainzsz 0 3.60 2016 A Walk Through Paris
author: Eric Hazan
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/31
date added: 2023/10/31
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]]> White Teeth 3711 White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.]]> 448 Zadie Smith 0375703861 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.80 2000 White Teeth
author: Zadie Smith
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/03
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]]> Stay True 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

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

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

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.01 2022 Stay True
author: Hua Hsu
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/25
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]]> Fellow Travelers 701724
Washington, D.C., in the early 1950 a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Into this fevered city steps Timothy Laughlin, a recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim’s first job in D.C. and–after Fuller’s advances–his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives� in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit and intrigue, and clinging to the friendship of a beautiful young woman named Mary Johnson, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions, his love for God, and his love for Fuller–an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.

Moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star , the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO’s front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is energized by high political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak. It is Thomas Mallon’s most accomplished and daring novel to date.]]> 356 Thomas Mallon 0375423486 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.56 2007 Fellow Travelers
author: Thomas Mallon
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps]]> 59381523 400 Seirian Sumner 0063029928 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.88 Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
author: Seirian Sumner
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/16
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]]> The House of Gazes 123434028
Daniele is a young poet plagued by an unknown darkness, “an invisible disease of the heart, or of the mind.� He refuses to conform to society’s expectations—finding a job, starting a family—yet he struggles to define a path of his own and find a sense of purpose in life.

In a desperate attempt to pull himself out of a dangerous spiral of emptiness and self-destruction, Daniele accepts a job at a pediatric hospital in Rome, the Bambino Gesù, where he’ll work with sick children, many of them terminally ill. In the “house of gazes,� that is, the hospital, through his interactions with patients and co-workers, and forced to confront pain in some of its most heartbreaking forms, Daniele will slowly start to look at life with new eyes, and learn to accept it in all its brutality and beauty.

Writing with the evocative power and sharp focus of a poet, Mencarelli tells a raw and moving story of self-discovery, renewal, and liberation achieved through solidarity and compassion, a story closely inspired by the events of his own life.]]> 215 Daniele Mencarelli 1609459733 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.05 2018 The House of Gazes
author: Daniele Mencarelli
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/12
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]]> The Elegance of the Hedgehog 2967752
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.]]> 325 Muriel Barbery 1933372605 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.76 2006 The Elegance of the Hedgehog
author: Muriel Barbery
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/12
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]]> The Guest 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 zainzsz 3 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/12
date added: 2023/09/12
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]]> Near to the Wild Heart 153425 Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.

Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.]]> 192 Clarice Lispector 0811211401 zainzsz 0 4.08 1943 Near to the Wild Heart
author: Clarice Lispector
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
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]]> The Hour of the Star 762390 The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.]]> 96 Clarice Lispector 0811211908 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.11 1977 The Hour of the Star
author: Clarice Lispector
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> Swimming in the Dark 49977811 Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism,Ìýa tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’sÌýGiovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.

Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.

Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart,ÌýSwimming in the DarkÌýis a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.]]> 191 Tomasz Jedrowski 006289000X zainzsz 0 to-read 4.25 2020 Swimming in the Dark
author: Tomasz Jedrowski
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983]]> 29093109 304 Robert Bresson 1681370441 zainzsz 0 4.27 2013 Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
author: Robert Bresson
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place]]> 52594137 � Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor Becoming Los Angeles , a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land , blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city’s image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city’s conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing―or rejecting―an Angeleno identity has come to mean. Becoming Los Angeles draws on a decade of Waldie’s writing about the intersection of the city’s history and its aspirations. He asks, what do we talk about when we talk about Los Angeles today? In a global, cosmopolitan city, is there value in cultivating a local imagination? And he wonders how to describe a city that is denser and more polarized and challenged by climate change, homelessness, and economic disparity. There will always be romance in the idea of Los Angeles, but it requires renewed hope to sustain. Becoming Los Angeles is a further account of how Waldie gained a sense of place, which James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, described as “an almost sacramental act of attention.� Becoming Los Angeles is ultimately a book about learning how to fall in love with wherever it is you are. Called a writer whose work is a “gorgeous distillation of architectural and social history� by the New York Times, whose essays and memoirs, said the Los Angeles Times, “conjure the idiosyncratic splendor of Southern California life,� D. J. Waldie is the author of the acclaimed Holy A Suburban Memoir and other books that illuminate the ordinary and the everyday in lyrical prose. In collaboration with Diane Keaton, Waldie provided the text for two photographic explorations of California Romantica , dealing with homes in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style of the early twentieth century, and House, examining post-modern interpretations of domesticity. California Romantica became a Los Angeles Times non-fiction bestseller in 2007. D. J. Waldie’s narratives about suburban life have appeared in BUZZ, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgetown Review, Salon, dwell, Los Angeles Magazine, Spiritus, Gulf Coast, Urbanisme, Bauwelt, and other publications. His book reviews and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in the home where he was born in Lakewood, California, where he was formerly the Deputy City Manager.]]> 224 D.J. Waldie 1626400792 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.05 Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place
author: D.J. Waldie
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.05
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date added: 2023/09/03
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]]> Brideshead Revisited 30933 Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.]]> 351 Evelyn Waugh 0316926345 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.01 1945 Brideshead Revisited
author: Evelyn Waugh
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism]]> 174711
"[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment."—Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review

"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer."� Publishers Weekly , starred review

"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit."—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail

" The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. . . . His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century."—T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times

"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the era's advertising."—Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine

"Tom Frank is . . . not only old-fashioned, he's anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics."—Roger Trilling, Details]]> 322 Thomas Frank 0226260127 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.85 1997 The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
author: Thomas Frank
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion]]> 25855218
Each episode review also includes brief explanations of locations, events, consumer products, and scientific advancements that are important to the characters, such as P.J. Clarke’s restaurant and the old Penn Station; the inventions of the birth control pill, the Xerox machine, and the Apollo Lunar Module; the release of the Beatles� Revolver and the Beach Boys� Pet Sounds ; and all the wars, protests, assassinations, and murders that cast a bloody pall over a chaotic decade.
Mad Men Carousel is named after an iconic moment from the show’s first-season finale, “The Wheel,� wherein Don delivers an unforgettable pitch for a new slide projector that’s centered on the idea of “the pain from an old wound.� This book will soothe the most ardent Mad Men fan’s nostalgia for the show. New viewers, who will want to binge-watch their way through one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory, will discover a spoiler-friendly companion to one of the most multilayered and mercurial TV shows of all time.

It's the perfect gift for Mad Men fans and obsessives.

Also available from Matt Zoller The Oliver Stone Experience , The Wes Anderson Bad Dads , The Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel , and The Wes Anderson Collection .]]> 464 Matt Zoller Seitz 1419720635 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.35 2015 Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion
author: Matt Zoller Seitz
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> <![CDATA[When You Are Engulfed in Flames]]> 1044355 When You Are Engulfed in Flames confirms once again that David Sedaris is a master of mystery and suspense.

Or how about...

when set on fire, most of us either fumble for our wallets or waste valuable time feeling sorry for ourselves. David Sedaris has studied this phenomenon, and his resulting insights may very well save your life. Author of the national bestsellers Should You Be Attacked By Snakes and If You Are Surrounded by Mean Ghosts, David Sedaris, with When You Are Engulfed in Flames, is clearly at the top of his game.

Oh, all right...

David Sedaris has written yet another book of essays (his sixth). Subjects include a parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law's leg, an encounter with a dingo, and the recreational use of an external catheter. Also recounted is the buying of a human skeleton and the author's attempt to quit smoking In Tokyo.

Master of nothing, at the dead center of his game, Sedaris proves that when you play with matches, you sometimes light the whole pack on fire.
(front flap)]]> 323 David Sedaris 0316143472 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.08 2005 When You Are Engulfed in Flames
author: David Sedaris
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> Copenhagen Tales (City Tales) 22477529
From the narrow twisting streets of the old town centre to the shady docklands, this rich anthology captures the essence of Copenhagen and its many faces. Through seventeen tales by some of the very best of Denmark's writers past and present, we travel the length and breadth of the Danish capital examining famous sights from unique perspectives. A guide book usefully informs a new visitor to Copenhagen but these stories allow the reader to experience the city and its history from the inside.]]> 376 Lotte Shankland 0199689113 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.28 2014 Copenhagen Tales (City Tales)
author: Lotte Shankland
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> All This Could Be Different 59576064
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489128 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.83 2022 All This Could Be Different
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076 Ìý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,� roamed � virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/22
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]]> The Holy Terrors 80268
At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacitly excluded. Their room is where the Game is played, the Game being their own bizarre version of life. All that they do outside is effectively controlled by the rules of the Game -- but unfortunately the rules of the Game mean that everybody loses.]]> 192 Jean Cocteau 0811200213 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.88 1929 The Holy Terrors
author: Jean Cocteau
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The White Book (Le Livre Blanc)]]> 420816 Le Livre blanc is one of the most personal works by Jean Cocteau. In a text that is elegant, daring and as relevant as ever, this novel � a singular account of a homosexual experience � sheds a unique light on a source of inspiration central to the poet’s entire oeuvre. This edition reproduces in color the eighteen magnificent drawings by Cocteau that accompanied the text in its first illustrated edition in 1930.]]> 104 Jean Cocteau 0872862380 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.84 1927 The White Book (Le Livre Blanc)
author: Jean Cocteau
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1927
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Scorsese on Scorsese 641355 254 David Thompson 0571178278 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.11 1989 Scorsese on Scorsese
author: David Thompson
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief]]> 6845762 The Pure Lover is David Plante’s elegy to his beloved Nikos Stangos, their forty-year life together, and its tragic end. Written in vivid fragments that, like the pieces of a mosaic, come together into a glimmering whole, it shows us both the wild nature of grief and the intimate conversation that is love.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 128 David Plante 0807072982 zainzsz 5 4.19 2009 The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief
author: David Plante
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/08/20
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]]> When We Lost Our Heads 58446244 A spellbinding story about two girls whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the trajectory of history.

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

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

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

Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal's wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can't let someone go.]]> 448 Heather O'Neill 0593422902 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.94 2022 When We Lost Our Heads
author: Heather O'Neill
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/20
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]]> The Sun Also Rises 3876 The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.]]> 189 Ernest Hemingway zainzsz 3 3.81 1926 The Sun Also Rises
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1926
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/08/20
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]]> Modern Nature 195040 Book by Jarman, Derek 320 Derek Jarman 087951549X zainzsz 0 to-read 4.31 1991 Modern Nature
author: Derek Jarman
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors]]> 52375 Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.]]> 183 Susan Sontag 0312420137 zainzsz 0 to-read 4.00 1989 Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
author: Susan Sontag
name: zainzsz
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/06
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]]> This Thing Between Us 56269269
“This intense cosmic horror with a touch of Mexican American folklore is incredibly creepy and moving.� —Margaret Kingsbury, BuzzFeed

It was Vera’s idea to buy the Itza. The “world’s most advanced smart speaker!� didn’t interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room.

It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago’s world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife’s death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room . . .

The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world.

A bold, original horror novel about grief, loneliness and the oppressive intimacy of technology, This Thing Between Us marks the arrival of a spectacular new talent.]]> 272 Gus Moreno 0374539235 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.70 2021 This Thing Between Us
author: Gus Moreno
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/02
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]]> Beautiful Losers 21176020
Revolving around four central � and intrinsically flawed � characters, ‘Beautiful Losers� is the frank and humorous story of a nameless narrator, his wife Edith, their domineering friend and mentor ‘F� and Catherine Tekakwitha, a mythic 17th-century Mohawk virgin saint. The complexities of this three-way love, pain and lust are sent spiralling by the death of Edith and ‘F� at the novel’s start, leading the damaged narrator to question the nature of love, sexuality and spirituality in a series of explicit flashbacks.

The extraordinary and inimitable singer-songwriter’s classic novel, this is Leonard Cohen’s most critically acclaimed literary work, echoing the dark poetry and wry humour of his timeless songs of loss, love, sex and religion.

Not just an extremely funny novel, but an incredibly original and explicit examination of friendship, sex and spirituality.]]> 258 Leonard Cohen 0007341482 zainzsz 0 to-read 3.49 1966 Beautiful Losers
author: Leonard Cohen
name: zainzsz
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/31
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]]>