en-US Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:19:14 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 8697453 ?
A searing portrayal of Vienna¡¯s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ¡®artistic dinner¡¯ hosted by a composer and his society wife¡ªa couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day. Reflections on Joana¡¯s life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing an explosive end to the evening that even the writer could not have seen coming.]]> 192 Thomas Bernhard 1400077591 Dale 0 currently-reading 4.18 1984
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Dale
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 230910361
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity¡¯s Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity¡¯s Rainbow in 1974.]]> 384 Thomas Pynchon 1594206104 Dale 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Dale
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 46041175 80 Mei-mei Berssenbrugge 0811229408 Dale 0 currently-reading 4.75 1989
author: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
name: Dale
average rating: 4.75
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> 46114 The Waves introduces six characters¡ªthree men and three women¡ªwho are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature¡¯s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf¡¯s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Dale 5 4.17 1931
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Dale
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
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"The rush of wheels became the roar of time."
]]> 14948
Included are entries that refer to her own writing, and those that are relevant to the raw material of her work, and, finally, comments on the books she was reading. The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world¡ªthe anguish, the triumph, the creative vision¡ªof one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

¡° A Writer¡¯s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.¡±¡ª New York Times Book Review

Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.]]> 355 Virginia Woolf 0156027917 Dale 4 4.16 1953
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Dale
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> 12349211
Much to the chagrin of J, the cats do not immediately love him.

The difference between fear and comedy is paper thin. Here's a cat comedy from a horror manga author.]]> 130 Junji Ito 4063376648 Dale 4 4.23 2009
author: Junji Ito
name: Dale
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> 10543 Ulysses. Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.

Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.

The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.]]> 698 James Joyce 0520067452 Dale 3 4.20 1922
author: James Joyce
name: Dale
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1922
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 7489048
Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and '70s who came of age during the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imaginations of young people everywhere.

Called ¡°the last of the Beats,¡± his early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one mayonnaise.

This edition features an introduction by poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan¡¯s work as a student in California.]]> 144 Richard Brautigan 0547255276 Dale 4 3.64 1967
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Dale
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 10882679 The Turn of the Screw, James's great masterpiece of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension, tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something, or someone, malevolent is stalking the children in her care. Is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence, or a manifestation of something else entirely?]]> 134 Henry James 0141441356 Dale 4 3.19 1898
author: Henry James
name: Dale
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1898
rating: 4
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]]> 980426 Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet, and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.

And when you appear

all the rivers sound

in my body, bells

shake the sky,

and a hymn fills the world.

        ? 1973 by Neruda & Walsh
]]> 90 Pablo Neruda 0811217299 Dale 0 to-read 4.20 1952
author: Pablo Neruda
name: Dale
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
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]]> 63029 Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University. She's tall, thin,brand blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women; the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book; an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the 70s, and the last words of the novel are; "And that song is our amulet."]]> 192 Roberto Bola?o 0811216640 Dale 0 to-read 3.87 1999
author: Roberto Bola?o
name: Dale
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> 28503848
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village caf¨¦ where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo¡¯s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York¡¯s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer¡¯s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith¡¯s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. ?
?
Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.

Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith]]> 288 Patti Smith 110191016X Dale 5 4.17 2015
author: Patti Smith
name: Dale
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
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]]> 216971220 What could accidentally moving into a house with thirty feral cats teach you about going viral, surviving capitalism, and the importance of community? Kind of a lot, actually.

When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn¡¯t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival¡ªin a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn¡¯t pay enough¡ªCourtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals.?

But the cats¡ªtheir pleading eyes, their ribs showing, the new kittens born in the driveway¡ªdidn¡¯t give her a choice.?

She had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem in neighborhoods across the country. And she couldn't have imagined how that struggle¡ªtowards an ethics of care, of individuals trying their best amidst spectacularly failing systems¡ªwould help pierce a personal darkness she'd wrestled for with much of her life. She also didn¡¯t expect that the TikTok and Instagram accounts she created to share the quirky personalities of the wild, but lovable cats, like Mushroom Risotto, Bubbles, Goldie, and Sad Boy, would end up saving her home.

Courtney writes toward a vision of community¡ªfrom the dark alleys where she feeds feral cats, from inside the tragically neglected homes where she climbs over piles of trash and occasionally animals, from her own driveway with the cats she loves and must sometimes let go. Compelling and tender, Poets Square is as much about cats as it is about the urgency of care,?community, and a little bit of dumb hope, in a world that can feel insurmountably broken.]]> 256 Courtney Gustafson 0593727614 Dale 0 to-read 4.65 2025
author: Courtney Gustafson
name: Dale
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> 55820878
With so little time left, can these two warring women find a bruised accord?]]> 201 Gwendoline Riley 1783783265 Dale 0 to-read 3.84 2021
author: Gwendoline Riley
name: Dale
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 23365262
From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.]]> 650 Clarice Lispector 0811219631 Dale 0 to-read 4.41 2015
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Dale
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 17573223 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macab¨¦a loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macab¨¦a's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love, and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel, arguably her best, is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.]]> 96 Clarice Lispector 0141392037 Dale 4 4.02 1977
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Dale
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1977
rating: 4
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]]> 22306083
1. The Gathering Storm
2. Their Finest Hour
3. The Grand Alliance
4. The Hinge of Fate
5. Closing the Ring
6. Triumph and Tragedy]]> Winston S. Churchill Dale 5 4.83 1948
author: Winston S. Churchill
name: Dale
average rating: 4.83
book published: 1948
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Dale 0 to-read 4.15 1977
author: Toni Morrison
name: Dale
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 292327
A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.]]> 206 Toni Morrison 0307278441 Dale 5 4.18 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: Dale
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 6097267
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May's cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values of assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.]]> 304 Edith Wharton 0199540012 Dale 4 4.06 1920
author: Edith Wharton
name: Dale
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1920
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> 128215 128 A.R. Ammons 0393324117 Dale 5 4.06 1993
author: A.R. Ammons
name: Dale
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 213405226 217 Cryptonymous Dale 0 to-read 0.0
author: Cryptonymous
name: Dale
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 43440 Forty Stories, the companion volume to Sixty Stories, we encounter a dazzling array of subjects: Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage and divorce, armadillos, and other unique Barthelmean flights of fancy. These pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces tangle with the ludicrous, pose questions that remain unresolved, and challenge familiar bits of language heretofore unexamined. Forty Stories demonstrates Barthelme's unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore.]]> 246 Donald Barthelme 0141180943 Dale 4 4.22 1987
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Dale
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1987
rating: 4
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]]> 6748 Infinite Jest.]]> 353 David Foster Wallace 0316925284 Dale 4 4.24 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Dale
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> 54042 Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ¡®the siege in the room¡¯.

¡®Malone¡¯, writes Malone, ¡®is what I am called now.¡¯ On his deathbed, whittling away the time with stories and revisions of stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is contradictory and intermittent, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of darker rages than his precursor Molloy. Malone promises silence, but as a storyteller he delivers irresistibly more.]]> 127 Samuel Beckett 0802151175 Dale 3 3.94 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Dale
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1951
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> 212319985 944 Garielle Lutz Dale 0 to-read 4.75
author: Garielle Lutz
name: Dale
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 203608433 From one of the most outspoken and respected NBA athletes comes a groundbreaking and remarkable memoir chronicling a very public struggle with depression, in the hopes that other young men will not suffer alone."As men, and especially Black men, we don¡¯t talk about our mental health enough. We struggle to admit when things aren¡¯t okay, even when it¡¯s obvious to everybody around us. I¡¯ve seen how toxic that can become. I¡¯ve experienced it myself, keeping everything under wraps until your head and heart are full of fire and rage.¡±DeMar DeRozan, six-time NBA All-Star, has been called a ¡°basketball savant¡± (ESPN) and ¡°the best closer in the NBA¡± (GQ)¡ªbut when he went public with his depression, it sparked a conversation that reached far beyond the court. By breaking the stigma of speaking out, he added a new, seldom-heard voice to the mental health a successful Black male athlete, openly naming his pain and advocating for others to do the same.Now it¡¯s time to tell the full story. Born and raised in Compton, DeRozan was no stranger to hardship¡ªliving in poverty, losing friends to gang violence. In worn-out school gyms and community centers, fueled by hunger and a desire to prove himself, he started to rise, but doubts followed. In Above the Noise, DeRozan opens up about his proudest triumphs and the times he felt so weighed down he couldn't get out of bed. He reflects on what it took to make a name for himself in a new country after getting drafted by the Toronto Raptors, the pressure of playing with veteran athletes as a twenty-year-old rookie, and the pain of losing role models.From a scared, angry kid to a confident father of five, DeRozan traces his journey to basketball stardom and the forces that honed him into the player¡ªand the slowly healing person¡ªhe is today. It will encourage anyone who has ever felt alone in their struggles and inspire a new generation of young people to rise above the noise and speak their truth.]]> 240 DeMar DeRozan 0593581261 Dale 4 4.28 2024
author: DeMar DeRozan
name: Dale
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> 25596589 Featured in the Academy Award-winning (Best Picture) film Birdman starring Michael Keaton

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people¡ªpeople without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.]]> 146 Raymond Carver 1101970588 Dale 4 3.94 1981
author: Raymond Carver
name: Dale
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> 212012812
Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother¡¯s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother¡¯s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.

"I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her."

In Hi, It¡¯s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It¡¯s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief¡ªand with astonishing precision and emotional force invokes the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: why must it be this way?]]> 347 Fawn Parker 0771005164 Dale 5 3.62 2024
author: Fawn Parker
name: Dale
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 28686959 256 Norm Macdonald 0812993624 Dale 0 to-read 4.03 2016
author: Norm Macdonald
name: Dale
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/23
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]]> 406373 Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephistopheles and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe¡¯s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.]]> 503 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0385031149 Dale 0 to-read 3.90 1808
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Dale
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1808
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> 11129189 Butcher¡¯s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, ?red up by Emerson to seek ¡°an original relation to nature,¡± drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher¡¯s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher¡¯s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher¡¯s Crossing to ?nd a world as irremediably changed as they have been.]]> 299 John Williams 1590174240 Dale 5 4.26 1960
author: John Williams
name: Dale
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> 60279883 A beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country by musician and writer PJ Harvey.

Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira¡¯s sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb¡¯s eyeball who is Ira-Abel¡¯s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children¡¯s songs, chants, and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow¡ªsuffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song, and bawdy humour.

Orlam is not only a remarkable coming-of-age tale, but the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades. Includes a facing-page English translation.

Orlam reveals PJ Harvey as not only one of the most talented songwriters of the age, but a gifted poet¡ªwhose formal skill and transforming eye and ear for the lyric line has produced a strange and moving poem like no other.
?]]> 301 P.J. Harvey 1529063116 Dale 3 4.04 2022
author: P.J. Harvey
name: Dale
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 77289
Ursula Le Guin, author of The Earthsea Trilogy, has a special way of blending stirring adventure with fantasy that has made comparison with such masters as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien inevitable.

Now, in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, seventeen of her favorite stories reaffirm Ursula Le Guin as one of America's outstanding writers.

CONTENTS:

Foreword
Semley's Necklace
April in Paris
The Masters
Darkness Box
The Word of Unbinding
The Rule of Names
Winter's King
The Good Trip
Nine Lives
Things
A Trip to the Head
Vaster than Empires and More Slow
The Stars Below
The Field of Vision
Direction of the Road
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
The Day Before the Revolution]]> 277 Ursula K. Le Guin 055302907X Dale 0 to-read 4.09 1975
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Dale
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family¡ªbut especially love¡ªfrom 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¡ªsuccessful, 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¡ªhis 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¡ªa 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 Dale 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Dale
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/22
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]]> 57595008 285 Shalane Flanagan 0593232453 Dale 0 to-read 4.40
author: Shalane Flanagan
name: Dale
average rating: 4.40
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date added: 2024/09/13
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]]> 18284662 Train Dreams is American epic in miniature and a novel that will stay with you for years to come.]]> 116 Denis Johnson 1847086624 Dale 4 3.90 2002
author: Denis Johnson
name: Dale
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
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]]> 1745103
Muffin sits at the dinner table, enjoys lettuce and rye crackers, and keeps a protective eye on the other cats in the family. One chilly winter morning, Muffin notices two lost fawns outside Lily's bedroom window. Determined to be helpful to others, Muffin heads out into the forest to deliver the fawns back to their mother. Hooting owls, grumpy squirrels, and chirping chickadees are encountered along the way, until Muffin realizes he has roamed very far into unfamiliar surroundings. The resourceful cat learns that he must rely on his own ingenuity to get himself out of trouble and back into the warmth of his cozy home.

In her first children's book, Joyce Carol Oates pairs playful prose with the exquisite naturalistic oil paintings of Mark Graham. Engaging and atmospheric, this charming tale is one that children will want to hear again and again.]]> 32 Joyce Carol Oates 088001556X Dale 0 to-read 3.42 1998
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Dale
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/27
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]]> 56019043
In 12 Rules for Life, clinical psychologist and celebrated professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto Dr. Jordan B. Peterson helped millions of readers impose order on the chaos of their lives. Now, in this bold sequel, Peterson delivers twelve more lifesaving principles for resisting the exhausting toll that our desire to order the world inevitably takes.

In a time when the human will increasingly imposes itself over every sphere of life¡ªfrom our social structures to our emotional states¡ªPeterson warns that too much security is dangerous. What¡¯s more, he offers strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific, and psychological forces causing us to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose, even¡ªand especially¡ªwhen we find ourselves powerless.

While chaos, in excess, threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission. Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guides us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.]]> 382 Jordan B. Peterson 0593084640 Dale 1 4.14 2021
author: Jordan B. Peterson
name: Dale
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 1
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 5423030 288 Dean Koontz 1401323529 Dale 0 to-read 4.20 2009
author: Dean Koontz
name: Dale
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/28
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]]> 160653 David Berman is a young Virginian poet with a sly,
intense regard for the past. He comes on like a prankster, restocking the imperial orations of Wallace Stevens and the byzantine monologues of John Ashbery with the pop- cultural bric-a-brac of a new generation: "I am not cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds." But his words have an easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history, casts a shadow. ¡ª The New Yorker

David Berman's poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent and funny. They are narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions. They take the familiar and make it new, so new the reader is stunned and will not soon forget. I found much to savor on every page of Actual Air. It's a book for everyone. ¡ª James Tate]]> 96 David Berman 1890447048 Dale 4 4.38 1999
author: David Berman
name: Dale
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 581809 The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work
Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in ¡°The Waste Land.¡± Here, in four linked poems (¡°Burnt Norton,¡± ¡°East Coker,¡± ¡°The Dry Salvages,¡± and ¡°Little Gidding¡±), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.]]> 64 T.S. Eliot 0156332256 Dale 5 4.44 1943
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Dale
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 446542 241 Samuel Beckett 0802151361 Dale 4 4.06 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Dale
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 201345 376 Brian Jacques 0441001866 Dale 3 4.16 1993
author: Brian Jacques
name: Dale
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
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]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante¡¯s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Dale 0 to-read 4.08 2011
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Dale
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 174622 308 James Salter 0679740732 Dale 0 to-read 4.07 1975
author: James Salter
name: Dale
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28348 564 Fyodor Dostoevsky Dale 5 4.32 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Dale
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2024/06/16
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]]> 139867
Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.]]> 82 Frank O'Hara 0872860353 Dale 0 to-read 4.16 1964
author: Frank O'Hara
name: Dale
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199531954 One of the great lyricists of our time, the lead singer and songwriter for the iconic Glasgow-based band Belle and Sebastian, pens a sensitive and intimate account¡ªhis debut novel based on his own youthful experiences¡ªof dark days leading to light and a coming of age through music.

It¡¯s the early 1990s in Glasgow, Scotland, and Stephen has emerged from a lengthy hospital stay. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood disease that has robbed him of any prospects of work, friends, or independent living, he moves slowly toward new goals and meets others like him, including Richard, a friend from school, and Carrie, a young woman bedridden for five years. Feeling isolated and alone, they form their own support group, and try to get by with as little money and pain as possible. Since he¡¯s been ill, Stephen never feels warm, inspiring Carrie to affectionately call him ¡°The World¡¯s Coldest Boy.¡± As the world seems to care less for them, the trio start to care less about fitting in with the world.

Stephen soon discovers he has a talent for writing songs. He awakens to the possibility of a spiritual life that transcends the everyday, and feels a calling for a place that might as well be on the other end of the universe let alone the world. Buoyed by tentative hope, he and Richard leave Glasgow in search of a cure in the mythic warmth and sun of California. As they float between hostels, sofas, and park benches, they discover the trip is life-changing in ways neither expected, and Stephen embraces a new-world reinvention that will change his life forever.
Melodic and captivating, filled with graceful notes, melancholic chords, and witty, thoughtful riffs on life's infinite possibilities and curiosities, Nobody¡¯s Empire is a warm and wonderful coming-of-age novel, imbued with Stuart Murdoch's magical lyricism.]]> 384 Stuart Murdoch 0063383454 Dale 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Stuart Murdoch
name: Dale
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/08
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]]> 133539
He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.]]> 615 Marcel Proust 0375751548 Dale 5 4.28 1913
author: Marcel Proust
name: Dale
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2024/04/29
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]]> 128218 96 A.R. Ammons 0393064468 Dale 4 4.25 2006
author: A.R. Ammons
name: Dale
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/04/28
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]]> 9902551 301 Graham Greene Dale 0 to-read 3.98 1940
author: Graham Greene
name: Dale
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 8456053 207 Josephine Tey 1616882018 Dale 0 to-read 3.76 1951
author: Josephine Tey
name: Dale
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 384104 220 A.R. Ammons 0393312046 Dale 0 to-read 4.21 1965
author: A.R. Ammons
name: Dale
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9809 165 Italo Calvino 0156453800 Dale 4 4.16 1972
author: Italo Calvino
name: Dale
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
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]]> 32307358 This an alternate cover for B01LY7FD0D

Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the ultramodern Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend a major announcement--the unveiling of a discovery that "will change the face of science forever." The evening's host is Edmond Kirsch, a forty-year-old billionaire and futurist whose dazzling high-tech inventions and audacious predictions have made him a renowned global figure. Kirsch, who was one of Langdon's first students at Harvard two decades earlier, is about to reveal an astonishing breakthrough . . . one that will answer two of the fundamental questions of human existence.

As the event begins, Langdon and several hundred guests find themselves captivated by an utterly original presentation, which Langdon realizes will be far more controversial than he ever imagined. But the meticulously orchestrated evening suddenly erupts into chaos, and Kirsch's precious discovery teeters on the brink of being lost forever. Reeling and facing an imminent threat, Langdon is forced into a desperate bid to escape Bilbao. With him is Ambra Vidal, the elegant museum director who worked with Kirsch to stage the provocative event. Together they flee to Barcelona on a perilous quest to locate a cryptic password that will unlock Kirsch's secret.

Navigating the dark corridors of hidden history and extreme religion, Langdon and Vidal must evade a tormented enemy whose all-knowing power seems to emanate from Spain's Royal Palace itself . . . and who will stop at nothing to silence Edmond Kirsch. On a trail marked by modern art and enigmatic symbols, Langdon and Vidal uncover clues that ultimately bring them face-to-face with Kirsch's shocking discovery . . . and the breathtaking truth that has long eluded us. Origin is stunningly inventive--Dan Brown's most brilliant and entertaining novel to date]]> 482 Dan Brown Dale 0 to-read 3.87 2017
author: Dan Brown
name: Dale
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 396677 The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorc¨¦es, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

--From the first-edition dustjacket]]> 726 William Gaddis 0394495500 Dale 0 to-read 4.61 1975
author: William Gaddis
name: Dale
average rating: 4.61
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1310518 956 William Gaddis 0151759715 Dale 5 4.28 1955
author: William Gaddis
name: Dale
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2018/06/04
date added: 2024/03/31
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]]> 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Dale 4 3.92 1992
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Dale
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
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]]> 2062034 306 Irvin D. Yalom 0787996688 Dale 0 to-read 4.25 2008
author: Irvin D. Yalom
name: Dale
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Dale 5 3.96 1987
author: Toni Morrison
name: Dale
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/03
date added: 2024/03/03
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]]> 124949167
The documents, as essential as they are intriguing¡ªdraft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera¡ª comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just steps away from the archival home of Dylan¡¯s early hero, Woody Guthrie.

Nearly all the materials preserved at The Bob Dylan Center are unique, previously unavailable, and, in many cases, even previously unknown. As the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center, BOB MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is the first wide-angle look at the Dylan archive, a book that promises to be of vast interest to both the Nobel Laureate¡¯s many musical fans and to a broader national and international audience as well.

Edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, BOB MIXING UP THE MEDICINE focuses a close look at the full scope of Dylan¡¯s working life, particularly from the dynamic perspective of his ongoing and shifting creative processes¡ªhis earliest home recordings in the mid-1950s right up through Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), his most recent studio recording, and into the present day.

The centerpiece of BOB MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is a carefully curated selection of over 600 images including never-before-circulated draft lyrics, writings, photographs, drawings and other ephemera from the Dylan archive.

With an introductory essay by Sean Wilentz and epilogue by Douglas Brinkley, the book features a surprising range of distinguished writers, artists and musicians, including Joy Harjo, Greil Marcus, Michael Ondaatje, Gregory Pardlo, Amanda Petrusich, Tom Piazza, Lee Ranaldo, Alex Ross, Ed Ruscha, Lucy Sante, Greg Tate and many others. After experiencing the collection firsthand in Tulsa, each of the authors was asked to select a single item that beguiled or inspired them. The resulting essays, written specifically for this volume, shed new light on not only Dylan¡¯s creative process, but also their own.
?
BOB MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is an unprecedented glimpse into the creative life of one of America¡¯s most groundbreaking, influential and enduring artists.]]> 608 Mark Davidson 1734537795 Dale 4 4.65
author: Mark Davidson
name: Dale
average rating: 4.65
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/13
date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> 58340689
?**Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award?(2023)**




The long-awaited first full biography of legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins? Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the ¡°Saxophone Colossus,¡± he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, winning Grammys, the Austrian Cross of Honor, Sweden¡¯s Polar Music Prize and a National Medal of Arts. A bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz, pictured in the iconic ¡°Great Day in Harlem¡± portrait. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called ¡°the only jazz recluse¡± has gone largely untold¡ªuntil now.?

Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins¡¯ extensive personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist. A child of the Harlem Renaissance, Rollins¡¯ precocious talent landed him on the bandstand and in the recording studio with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, or playing opposite Billie Holiday. An icon in his own right, he recorded Tenor Madness, featuring John Coltrane; Way Out West; Freedom Suite, the first civil rights-themed album of the hard bop era; A Night at the Village Vanguard; and the 1956 classic Saxophone Colossus.?

Yet his meteoric rise to fame was not without its challenges. He served two sentences on Rikers Island and won his battle with heroin addiction. In 1959, Rollins took a two-year sabbatical from recording and performing, practicing up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge. In 1968, he left again to study at an ashram in India. He returned to performing from 1971 until his retirement in 2012.??

The story of Sonny Rollins¡ªinnovative, unpredictable, larger than life¡ªis the story of jazz itself, and Sonny¡¯s own narrative is as timeless and timely as the art form he represents. Part jazz oral history told in the musicians¡¯ own words, part chronicle of one man¡¯s quest for social justice and spiritual enlightenment, this is the definitive biography of one of the most enduring and influential artists in jazz and American history.]]> 784 Aidan Levy 0306902796 Dale 5 4.44
author: Aidan Levy
name: Dale
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/13
date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> 25739169 ?
The Birds tells the story of Mattis, a deeply sensitive, intellectually disabled young man living in a small house in the Norwegian countryside with his sister Hege. Eking out a modest living knitting sweaters, Hege encourages her brother to find work to ease their financial burdens, but his attempts come to nothing.

When he finally sets himself up as a? ferryman, the only passenger he manages to bring across the lake is a lumberjack, J?rgen. But when J?rgen and Hege become lovers, Mattis finds the safety of his familial life threatened and his jealousy quickly spirals.

In The Birds , Norway¡¯s most celebrated writer of the twentieth century allows us to rediscover the world. By turns frightening, beautiful, confounding, and full of mystery, it is a world we come to see more vividly through Mattis¡¯s eyes.]]> 301 Tarjei Vesaas 0914671200 Dale 0 to-read 4.31 1957
author: Tarjei Vesaas
name: Dale
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9903 ¡®´¡ dazzling and savage first novel¡¯ New York Times

Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.

So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America ¨C the bars, bus stations, mental wards, and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death.

From the author of Tree of Smoke , winner of the National Book Award for Fiction]]> 209 Denis Johnson 0099440830 Dale 0 to-read 3.98 1977
author: Denis Johnson
name: Dale
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4100780 Washington Square and intricately woven and highly complex later novels such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, James's work is a required stop on any journey through our nation's artistic and cultural heritage.
An undisputed masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady is arguably James's most popular work, and certainly the finest of his early novels. It focuses on Isabel Archer, a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a "house of suffocation."
Portrait of a Lady is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late. This new edition includes helpful notes on the numerous changes James made between the first edition and the revised New York Edition, reproduced here, an up-to-date bibliography, and a new chronology.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
]]> 600 Henry James 0199217947 Dale 5 3.88 1881
author: Henry James
name: Dale
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/19
date added: 2024/01/30
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]]> 28358362 949 Stephen Kotkin 0141027940 Dale 0 to-read 4.33
author: Stephen Kotkin
name: Dale
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/12
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]]> 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Dale 0 to-read 4.24 1940
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Dale
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 124272 The Wings of the Dove is the story of Milly Theale, a na?ve, doomed American heiress, and a pair of lovers, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who conspire to obtain her fortune. In this witty tragedy of treachery, self-deception, and betrayal, Henry James weaves together three ill-fated and wholly human destinies unexpectedly linked by desire, greed, and salvation. As Amy Bloom writes in her Introduction, ¡°The Wings of the Dove is a novel of intimacy. . . . [James] gives us passion, he gives us love in its terrible and enchanting forms.¡±]]> 741 Henry James 0812967194 Dale 0 to-read 3.81 1902
author: Henry James
name: Dale
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1902
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 101137620 A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly¡¯s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.]]> 320 Blake Butler 1648230377 Dale 0 to-read 3.61 2023
author: Blake Butler
name: Dale
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Dale 0 to-read 4.47 2014
author: Atul Gawande
name: Dale
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> 87635 Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. Thomas De Quincey consumed daily large quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven, describing in intimate detail the mind-altering pleasures and pains unique to opium. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary addicts from Baudelaire to James Frey, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.

This edition is based on the original serial version of 1821, and reproduces two 'sequels', 'Suspiria de Profundis' (1845) and 'The English Mail-Coach' (1849). It also includes a critical introduction discussing the romantic figure of the addict and the tradition of confessional literature, and an appendix on opium in the nineteenth century.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) studied at Oxford, failing to take his degree but discovering opium. He later met Coleridge, Southey and the Wordsworths. From 1828 until his death he lived in Edinburgh and made his living from journalism.

If you enjoyed Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you might like William S. Burroughs' Junky, available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'De Quincey was one of the first great autobiographers'
Jonathan Bate]]> 352 Thomas de Quincey Dale 0 to-read 3.30 1821
author: Thomas de Quincey
name: Dale
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1821
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/27
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]]> 838038 361 Clarice Lispector 0292703929 Dale 0 to-read 4.00 1961
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Dale
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62001844
A heavily abridged English translation of Lies and Sorcery came out in the 1950s under the title of House of Lies. Jenny McPhee¡¯s new translation is the first complete English rendering of the book that Georg Luk¨¢cs considered the greatest of modern Italian novels.]]> 800 Elsa Morante 1681376849 Dale 0 to-read 4.02 1948
author: Elsa Morante
name: Dale
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 189123 Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.]]> 321 Eileen Chang 1590171780 Dale 0 to-read 3.91 1943
author: Eileen Chang
name: Dale
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson¡¯s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family¡¯s dark secret

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Dale 0 to-read 3.93 1962
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dale
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/05
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]]> 158217 Journey by Moonlight (Utas ¨¦s Holdvil¨¢g) is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.

'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...'

Mih¨¢ly has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with wife Erszi, he soon abandons her in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, Mih¨¢ly loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life, or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.

Journey by Moonlight (Utas ¨¦s Holdvil¨¢g) is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.

Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (first published as Utas ¨¦s Holdvil¨¢g in Hungary in 1937) is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.]]> 299 Antal Szerb 1901285502 Dale 0 to-read 4.22 1937
author: Antal Szerb
name: Dale
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 153426 173 Clarice Lispector 0816617120 Dale 0 to-read 4.20 1964
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Dale
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123183412
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain . With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural her parents¡¯ volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs ¡°The Artist¡±; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn¡¯t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience¡ªit¡¯s all here, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book¡¯s publication, Fox¡¯s description of it as ¡°a masterpiece¡± in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.]]> 318 Julia Fox 1668011506 Dale 0 to-read 4.38 2023
author: Julia Fox
name: Dale
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/01
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]]> 187244487
Publisher's description:

The crown jewel of the Russian literary canon, War and Peace has long enriched the lives and imaginations of readers across the globe. The Meow Library is proud to offer this daring translation for your cat, so it too can experience the magnificence of this timeless epic.

Through the ingenious device of repeating the word "meow" over 400,000 times across 750 pages, we've rendered Tolstoy's prose with unwavering fidelity to feline vocalization patterns, immortalizing the Russian master's unparalleled wit, insight, and attention to detail in the most universal of all languages.]]> 762 Sam Austen Dale 4 4.63
author: Sam Austen
name: Dale
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/10/29
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]]> 41940267 Beowulf by the author of The Mere Wife.

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney¡¯s translation of Beowulf ¡ª and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world ¡ª there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist¡¯s eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment ¡ª of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child ¡ª but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.]]> 140 Unknown 0374110034 Dale 0 to-read 4.10 1000
author: Unknown
name: Dale
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1000
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 13580950
No Regrets covers Scott Walker¡¯s entire career. It features 30th Century Man director Stephen Kijak on filming Scott; David Toop and Chris Sharp ponder The Drift; Nina Power, Derek Walmsley, Damon Krukowski and Brian Morton consider Scott¡¯s other solo albums; while Amanda Petrusich journeys through his mid-seventies ¡®country¡¯ records. Ian Penman meditates upon the reluctant TV star; David Stubbs looks at his soundtrack and choreography work; and Biba Kopf and Anthony Reynolds reassess the Walker Brothers, while Rob Young contributes a biographical overview.

Overturning myths and getting to the heart of Walker¡¯s incredible diverse body of recorded work, No Regrets is the most incisive study yet of this great American artist and iconic vocalist.]]> 273 Rob Young 1409102734 Dale 0 to-read 3.80 2012
author: Rob Young
name: Dale
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 130115
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.

The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.]]> 208 Doris Lessing 0002257556 Dale 0 to-read 3.84 1950
author: Doris Lessing
name: Dale
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/11
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]]> 23965 Trainspotting, Sick Boy est¨¢ en franca decadencia. Acaba de dejar su piso en un barrio pijo de Londres y se ha mudado a un agujero miserable, y tras una noche de drogas y sexo indiscriminados, decide aceptar la oferta de su t¨ªa Paula: lo dejar¨¢ a cargo de su pub en Leith y se marchar¨¢ con su amante espa?ol a Alicante.

Pero en el Port Sunshine el negocio no est¨¢ solamente en las bebidas: Sick Boy descubre que un grupo liderado por ?Juice? Terry Lawson, su antiguo conocido, se re¨²ne a follar y a filmar sus org¨ªas en uno de los salones privados. Y que en Edimburgo hay un floreciente negocio de v¨ªdeos porno realizados en las trastiendas de los pubs, con los clientes como estrellas. Y Sick Boy, que siempre est¨¢ maquinando negocios, se pondr¨¢, con la ayuda de la guapa Nikki Fuller-Smith, estudiante de cine de d¨ªa y trabajadora del sexo por las noches, a hacer una pel¨ªcula porno de altura, con calidad suficiente como para ser vendida internacionalmente y circular por Internet. Y tambi¨¦n incluir¨¢ en el equipo a su viejo amigo Renton, el que diez a?os antes los traicion¨® y huy¨® a ?msterdam con el dinero del alijo de hero¨ªna. Pero cuando Sick Boy maquina algo, la cosa tiene m¨¢s complicaciones y trampas que la tela de una ara?a, y entre los hilos tambi¨¦n se mueven Spud, el ¨²nico que hab¨ªa recibido a escondidas su parte del dinero de la droga, y Begbie, el psic¨®pata del grupo, que despu¨¦s de pasar unos a?os en la c¨¢rcel volver¨¢ a la acci¨®n a¨²n m¨¢s paranoico y furioso que antes.]]> 600 Irvine Welsh 8433972618 Dale 0 to-read 3.84 2002
author: Irvine Welsh
name: Dale
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 153
Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.]]> 838 Leo Tolstoy 0140449175 Dale 5 4.21 1878
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Dale
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1878
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/03
date added: 2023/10/03
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]]> 12574 302 Richard Brautigan 2267002892 Dale 0 to-read 3.98 1980
author: Richard Brautigan
name: Dale
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1297985 400 Oliver Sacks Dale 0 currently-reading 3.95 2007
author: Oliver Sacks
name: Dale
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 58314 The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel¨Cpart Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.

Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.]]> 272 Michel Houellebecq 0375727019 Dale 2 3.91 1998
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Dale
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/27
date added: 2023/07/27
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]]> 7428663 192 Anne Carson 0811218708 Dale 5 currently-reading 4.37 2010
author: Anne Carson
name: Dale
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/12
date added: 2023/07/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 691014 86 Anne Sexton 0395203651 Dale 4 4.22 1975
author: Anne Sexton
name: Dale
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/09
date added: 2023/07/22
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]]> 50140
"Big Sur's humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished¡ªothers crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur."¡ªAllen Ginsberg 10/10/91 N.Y.C.]]> 256 Jack Kerouac 0140168125 Dale 0 to-read 3.85 1962
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Dale
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/15
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]]> 150236 This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."

The Dream Songs are eighteen-line poems in three stanzas. Each individual poem is lyric and organized around an emotion provoked by an everyday event. The tone of the poems is less surreal than associational or intoxicated. The principal character of the song cycle is Henry, who is both the narrator of the poems and referred to by the narrator in the poems.

]]> 427 John Berryman 0374530661 Dale 4 4.19 1969
author: John Berryman
name: Dale
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/13
date added: 2023/07/13
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]]> 10629
Elle aime les sensations fortes, les vir¨¦es nocturnes et le rock n'roll des ann¨¦es h¨¦ro?ques. Depuis qu'elle conna?t Arnie, elle est amoureuse. Signe particulier : Christine est une Plymouth ? Fury ?, sortie en 1958 des ateliers automobiles de Detroit.

Une seule rivale en travers de sa route : Leigh, la petite amie d'Arnie¡­
Ce roman l¨¦gendaire de Stephen King, rythm¨¦ par la musique de Chuck Berry et de Janis Joplin, a d¨¦j¨¤ pris place parmi les classiques de l'¨¦pouvante.]]> 411 Stephen King 2253147699 Dale 3 3.85 1983
author: Stephen King
name: Dale
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1983
rating: 3
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date added: 2023/07/13
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]]> 40819145 378 Quan Millz Dale 0 to-read 3.99
author: Quan Millz
name: Dale
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/12
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]]> 13631784 232 No?lle Revaz 1564787214 Dale 0 to-read 3.96 2002
author: No?lle Revaz
name: Dale
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/30
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]]> 744833 Invisible Man. This huge oratorio of a novel unfolds over seven days in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright making ends meet tending bar at his Aunt Eloise's Night Lounge. A Rabelaisian cast of characters and a Shakespearean range of voices crowd the pages of this book, an infinitely rich and suggestive tapestry of Black-American life and identity.]]> 1135 Leon Forrest 0393312216 Dale 0 to-read 4.37 1992
author: Leon Forrest
name: Dale
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/29
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]]> 20518872 472 Liu Cixin Dale 0 to-read 4.08 2006
author: Liu Cixin
name: Dale
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/17
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]]> 414298 391 Richard Russo 0375701907 Dale 4 4.01 1997
author: Richard Russo
name: Dale
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/16
date added: 2023/06/16
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]]> 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human¡ªand one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace Dale 4 4.26 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Dale
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/06/06
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]]>