Daniel's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:15:58 -0700 60 Daniel's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg A Suspension of Mercy 27424816
Sydney Bartleby has, compulsively, repeatedly, plotting methods and forging alibis. He's a thriller writer, after all. He even knows how he would dispose of her body. When Alicia goes missing, Bartleby struggles to convince anyone of his innocence, caught in a trap of his own making...]]> 251 Patricia Highsmith 0349004579 Daniel 4 3.78 1965 A Suspension of Mercy
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
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Quite ingenious. From one perspective, it’s an implausible, ridiculous narrative confection. But from the perspective of the crime novelist, who is obliged to earn her daily bread by stepping into the shoes of killers and and criminals, the premise and absurd situation at the center of this novel are the most natural and inevitable things in the world. Crime writers like Highsmith are constantly having to imagine what it would be like to be entangled in a set of experiences which are ideally far removed from them in real life. They necessarily seek out and tempt and pursue the unsettling and macabre that most ordinary people avoid. They dwell in and attempt to protract for as long as possible the sinister , trying as hard as they can to imagine what it would be like to be caught up in a murder. From an outsider perspective everything the protagonist writer does in this novel would seem perverse. Who would wanna prolong a situation which threatens to imprison him and creates all kinds of professional problems for him? Again, and again we watch Sydney, the protagonist, willfully declining to extricate himself from further danger because more than being criminally off the hook what interests him is the elusive knowledge of what it would feel like to be caught up in a crime. His own entanglement in a suspected crime is exploited by him as a pretext to get a fuller understanding of the set of criminal experiences he writes about. This novel is remarkable for its illustration of the lengths that some committed writers (like highsmith) are willing to go to in order to understand and inhabit the dark remote experiences of, for instance, a man who has murdered his wife. Sydney is a kind of parodic self portrait of highsmith’s. The length that both are willing to go may seem from a certain perspective, absurd. But again from the perspective of someone whose project and daily task is to create an artistically convincing and commercially viable work surrounding the murder of an individual there is nothing unnatural in it .This novel is what the sacred fount is in the works of Henry James. It’s the work in which the writer reflects most elaborately on the existential predicament of being the kind of writer that produces the kind of fiction they produce.
]]> <![CDATA[Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks]]> 59636719

Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating “atmosphere of nameless dread� (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations, at last we see how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.]]> 986 Patricia Highsmith 147461762X Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.81 Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.81
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]]> Carol 10117779 The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.]]> 320 Claire Morgan 1408808978 Daniel 4 4.00 1952 Carol
author: Claire Morgan
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction]]> 572046 - The Guardian.]]> 145 Patricia Highsmith 031204867X Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.74 1966 Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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]]> The Very Hungry Caterpillar 4948
One sunny Sunday, the caterpillar was hatched out of a tiny egg. He was very hungry. On Monday, he ate through one apple; on Tuesday, he ate through three plums--and still he was hungry. When full at last, he made a cocoon around himself and went to sleep, to wake up a few weeks later wonderfully transformed into a butterfly!

The brilliantly innovative Eric Carle has dramatized the story of one of Nature's commonest yet loveliest marvels, the metamorphosis of the butterfly. This audiobook will delight as well as instruct the very youngest listener.]]> 26 Eric Carle 0241003008 Daniel 5 4.33 1969 The Very Hungry Caterpillar
author: Eric Carle
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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]]> The Husband Stitch 55452104 "‘I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.�

If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.

Carmen Maria Machado is the celebrated author of the memoir In the Dream House and the vibrant story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, a Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.]]> 45 Carmen Maria Machado Daniel 3 4.32 The Husband Stitch
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.32
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rating: 3
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]]> In the Dream House 43317482 251 Carmen Maria Machado 1644450038 Daniel 2 4.41 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile]]> 263254 The First Five Pages

Editors always tell novice writers that the first few pages of a manuscript are crucial in the publishing process -- and it's true. If an editor or agent (or reader) loses interest after a page or two, you've lost him or her completely, even if the middle of your novel is brilliant and the ending phenomenal. Noah Lukeman, an agent in Manhattan, has taken this advice and created a book that examines just what this means, and I have to tell you, it's one of the best I've read.

I've written (and seen published) pretty close to a dozen novels in as many years -- some are still to be published and will be out shortly; others are already out of print after four years. But I wish I had read Lukeman's book, The First Five Pages, when I began writing fiction.

I'm glad I did now. It has helped, immediately. I'm already embarrassed about some of the goofs I made in my writing -- and I've been revising recent prose with his advice in mind.

First off, Lukeman is a literary agent who once was an editor, and his editorial eye is sharp. If every novelist and short story writer in this country had Lukeman as an editor, we'd have a lot more readable prose out there.

He writes:

Many writers spend the majority of their time devising their plot. What they don't seem to understand is that if their execution -- if their prose -- isn't up to par, their plot may not even be considered.


This bears repeating, because in all the books I've read on writing, this is an element that is most often forgotten in the rush to come up with snappy ideas and sharp plot progressions. You can always send a hero on a journey, after all, but if no reader wants to follow him, you've wasted your time.

In a tone that can be a bit professorial at times, Lukeman brings what prose is -- and how it reads to others -- into sharp focus. He deals with dialogue, style, and, most importantly, sound.

Sound.

How does prose sound?

It must have rhythm, its own kind of music, in order to draw the reader into the fictive dream. Lukeman's tips and pointers are genuinely helpful, and even important with regard to the sound of the prose itself.

Lukeman also brings in on-target exercises for writers of prose and the wonderful advice for novelists to read poetry -- and often.

Those first five pages are crucial, for all concerned. But forget the editor and agent and reader. They are important for you, the writer, because they determine the sharpness of your focus, the completeness of your vision, the confidence you, as a writer, need to plunge into a three- or four- or five-hundred-page story.

The First Five Pages should be on every writer's shelf. This is the real thing.P#151;Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg is the author of numerous novels and stories, including The Halloween Man and the collection The Nightmare Chronicles. In addition, Clegg is the author of the world's first publisher-sponsored Internet email novel, Naomi.]]> 208 Noah Lukeman 068485743X Daniel 1 3.97 2000 The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
author: Noah Lukeman
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
rating: 1
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date added: 2025/03/25
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Trite on-the-nose tips, most useful for beginners
]]> <![CDATA[Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence]]> 34272565 How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology--and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle?

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues--from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.]]> 384 Max Tegmark 0451485076 Daniel 2 4.02 2017 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
author: Max Tegmark
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2017
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies]]> 20527133 Superintelligence asks the questions: what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful—possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?]]> 352 Nick Bostrom 0199678111 Daniel 0 to-read 3.86 2014 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
author: Nick Bostrom
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft]]> 437148
He tells readers about what books and films influenced him as a young writer, his first idea for a story, and the true-life tale that inspired "Carrie". For the first time, here's an intimate autobiographical portrait of his home life, his family, and his traumatic accident. Citing examples of his work and those of his contemporaries, King gives an excellent masterclass on writing - how to use the tools of the trade from building characters to pace and plotting as well as practical advice on presentation. And he tells readers how he got to be a No. 1 bestseller for a quarter of a century with fascinating descriptions of his own process, the origins and development of, for example, "Carrie" and "Misery."]]> 288 Stephen King 0684853523 Daniel 2 4.32 2000 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
author: Stephen King
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2020/06/22
date added: 2025/02/23
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What an odd man King is. I chuckled all the way through but not for the right reasons, I think. Still, I can't dislike him because he's so winningly self-deprecating.
]]> Duma Key 472343
A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.

"Edgar does anything make you happy?"

"I used to sketch."

"Take it up again. You need hedges . . .

hedges against the night."

Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.

The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural--Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.]]> 611 Stephen King 1416552510 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.97 2008 Duma Key
author: Stephen King
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> Where the Wild Things Are 17125757 48 Maurice Sendak 178230004X Daniel 2 4.36 1963 Where the Wild Things Are
author: Maurice Sendak
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1963
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Other Bostonians, Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970]]> 594402 Book by Thernstrom, Stephan 302 Stephan Thernstrom 0674695003 Daniel 0 to-read 3.77 1964 The Other Bostonians, Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970
author: Stephan Thernstrom
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> Dark Places 18226389
Ben was a social misfit, ground down by the small-town farming community in which he lived. But he did have a girlfriend - a brooding heavy metal fan called Diondra. Through her, Ben became involved with drugs and the dark arts. When the town suddenly turned against him, his thoughts turned black. But was he capable of murder? Libby must delve into her family's past to uncover the truth - no matter how painful...]]> 345 Gillian Flynn 0804138338 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.83 2009 Dark Places
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> Orbital 123136728
Contudo, mesmo tão distantes do mundo, os seis astronautas não conseguem escapar à sua constante influência. Chegam notícias da morte de uma mãe, trazendo pensamentos de regresso e de saudades de casa. A fragilidade da vida humana torna-se um tema central nas suas conversas, nos seus medos e nos seus sonhos.

Apesar de tão longe da Terra, nunca antes se haviam sentido tão protetores dela, tão parte dela. Começam a refletir: o que será a vida sem a Terra? O que será a Terra sem a humanidade?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.56 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface]]> 28915986
While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you.

That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers. Topics covered

•emotional modes of writing
•beyond showing versus telling
•your story's emotional world
•moral stakes
•connecting the inner and outer journeys
•plot as emotional opportunities
•invoking higher emotions, symbols, and emotional language
•cascading change
•story as emotional mirror
•positive spirit and magnanimous writing
•the hidden current that makes stories move
Readers can simply read a novel...or they can experience it. The Emotional Craft of Fiction shows you how to make that happen.]]> 224 Donald Maass 1440348375 Daniel 3 4.24 2016 The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface
author: Donald Maass
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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The message is something most writers who are able to move readers will have figured out the hard way through years of struggle. He presents it as a kind of revolutionary insight (which it no doubt is for many readers,) but it’s a well-trodden path he walks. He never cites T S Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative,� for instance, but the book seems to independently reach the same conclusion. All that said, the advice here is more important than in most other craft books I’ve read.
]]> <![CDATA[The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family]]> 58475626 The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.]]> 237 Joshua Cohen 1681376075 Daniel 4 comps 3.88 2021 The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
author: Joshua Cohen
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Journals: Volume I: 1949-1965]]> 56024
Commencing in Fowles’s final year at Oxford, the journals in this volume chronicle the years he spent as a university lecturer in France; his experiences teaching school on the Greek island of Spetsai (which would inspire The Magus ) and his love affair there with the married woman who would later become his first wife; and his return to England and his ongoing struggle to achieve literary success. It is an account of a life lived in total engagement with the world; although Fowles the novelist takes center stage, we see as well Fowles the nascent poet and critic, ornithologist and gardener, passionate naturalist and traveler, cinephile and collector of old books.

Soon after he fell in love with his first wife, Elizabeth, Fowles wrote in his journal, “She has asked me not to write about her in here. But I could not not write, loving her as I do. . . . What else I betrayed, I could not betray this diary.� It is that determined, unsparing honesty and forthrightness that imbues these journals with all the emotional power and narrative complexity of his novels. They are a revelation of both the man and the artist.]]> 688 John Fowles 1400044316 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.04 2003 The Journals: Volume I: 1949-1965
author: John Fowles
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success]]> 834781 245 Donald Maass 0435086936 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.01 1996 The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success
author: Donald Maass
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook: Hands-On Help for Making Your Novel Stand Out and Succeed]]> 151535
Noted literary agent and author Donald Maass has done it again! His previous book, "Writing the Breakout Novel," offered novelists of all skill levels and genres insider advice on how to make their books rise above the competition and succeed in a crowded marketplace.

Now, building on the success of its predecessor, "Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook" calls that advice into action! This powerful book presents the patented techniques and writing exercises from Maass's popular writing workshops to offer novelists first-class instruction and practical guidance. You'll learn to develop and strengthen aspects of your prose with sections on:


Building plot layers
Creating inner conflict
Strengthening voice and point of view
Discovering and heightening larger-than-life character qualities
Strengthening theme
And much more!
Maass also carefully dissects examples from real-life breakout novels so you'll lean how to read and analyze fiction like a writer. With authoritative instruction and hands-on workbook exercises, "Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook" is one of the most accessible novel-writing guides available.

Set your work-in progress apart from the competition and write your own breakout novel today!]]> 240 Donald Maass 158297263X Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.28 2004 Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook: Hands-On Help for Making Your Novel Stand Out and Succeed
author: Donald Maass
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2004
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]]> The Magus 1408922 The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, but even almost half a century after its first publication, it continues to create tension and concern, remaining the page-turner that it was when it was first released.]]> 656 John Fowles 0586045120 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.99 1965 The Magus
author: John Fowles
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within]]> 44905 336 Natalie Goldberg 1590303164 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.21 1986 Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> A Shining 137592093 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781945492778.

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity.]]> 74 Jon Fosse Daniel 2 3.51 2023 A Shining
author: Jon Fosse
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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]]> Lord of the Flies 84943 Librarian's note: Alternate cover editions can be found here, here, here and here.

When a plane crashes on a remote island, a small group of schoolboys are the sole survivors. From the prophetic Simon and virtuous Ralph to the lovable Piggy and brutish Jack, each of the boys attempts to establish control as the reality - and brutal savagery - of their situation sets in.

The boys' struggle to find a way of existing in a community with no fixed boundaries invites readers to evaluate the concepts involved in social and political constructs and moral frameworks. Ideas of community, leadership, and the rule of law are called into question as the reader has to consider who has a right to power, why, and what the consequences of the acquisition of power may be. Often compared to Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies also represents a coming-of-age story of innocence lost.]]> 202 William Golding Daniel 2 3.64 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1954
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author's Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development]]> 32606730 Powerful Character Arcs Create Powerful Stories

Have you written a story with an exciting concept and interesting characters—but it just isn’t grabbing the attention of readers or agents? It’s time to look deeper into the story beats that create realistic and compelling character arcs. Internationally published, award-winning novelist K.M. Weiland shares her acclaimed method for achieving memorable and moving character arcs in every book you write.

By applying the foundation of the Three-Act Story Structure and then delving even deeper into the psychology of realistic and dynamic human change, Weiland offers a beat-by-beat checklist of character arc guidelines that flexes to fit any type of story.

This comprehensive book will teach you:

How to determine which arc—positive, negative, or flat—is right for your character.
Why you should NEVER pit plot against character. Instead, learn how to blend story structure and character development.
How to recognize and avoid the worst pitfalls of writing novels without character arcs.
How to hack the secret to using overarching character arcs to create amazing trilogies and series.
And much more!

Gaining an understanding of how to write character arcs is a game-changing moment in any author’s pursuit of the craft.

Bring your characters to unforgettable and realistic life—and take your stories from good to great!

]]> 215 K.M. Weiland 1944936033 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.31 2016 Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author's Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development
author: K.M. Weiland
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Real Life 46263943
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.]]> 329 Brandon Taylor 0525538887 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.79 2020 Real Life
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> The Inheritors 14428
From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors is a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals, and a frightening vision of the beginning of a new age.]]> 233 William Golding 0156443791 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.55 1955 The Inheritors
author: William Golding
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> Catalina 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Daniel 1 3.57 2024 Catalina
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder, Kindle Edition]]> 18747032 This expanded and thoroughly revised new edition is designed not only to add hundreds of useful new words to a student’s permanent working vocabulary but also to teach the most common and useful Greek and Latin word-building roots to help students understand and master additional vocabulary in the future.

Example sentences and brief explanatory comments provide a rich context to bring the words to life, and quizzes are provided to encourage reuse and recall of words and to reinforce memory of them. All of these features combine to make this a valuable tool for students preparing for standardized tests or simply seeking to expand their English vocabulary.

]]> 721 Mary Wood Cornog 0877797951 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.55 1994 Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder, Kindle Edition
author: Mary Wood Cornog
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Daniel 4 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2009/03/06
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Our Mother's House 1763008
So begins this story of seven extraordinary children who, faced with the unknown terrors of an orphanage, decide not to report their mother's death.

They bury her in the garden and build a tabernacle over her grave.
To the outside world they pretend she is ill and confined to her room.

Their problems begin immediately. Curious officials make inquiries, well-meaning neighbors offer assistance. The children themselves fall to quarreling.

Then a spellbinding stranger appears, claiming to be their father. He agrees to keep their secret -- and from that point the story moves relentlessly to its incredible climax.]]> 295 Julian Gloag 0671435310 Daniel 0 to-read 3.70 1963 Our Mother's House
author: Julian Gloag
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book]]> 46065066 Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book has over 150 contributors from all walks of the industry, including international bestselling authors Anthony Doerr, Roxane Gay, Garth Greenwell, Lisa Ko, R. O. Kwon, Rebecca Makkai, and Ottessa Moshfegh, alongside cult favorites Sarah Gerard, Melissa Febos, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Mira Jacob. Agents, film scouts, film producers, translators, disability and minority activists, and power agents and editors also weigh in, offering advice and sharing intimate anecdotes about even the most taboo topics in the industry. Their wisdom will help aspiring authors find a foothold in the publishing world and navigate the challenges of life before and after publication with sanity and grace.

Are MFA programs worth the time and money? How do people actually sit down and finish a novel? Did you get a good advance? What do you do when you feel envious of other writers? And why the heck aren’t your friends saying anything about your book? Covering questions ranging from the logistical to the existential (and everything in between), Before and After the Book Deal is the definitive guide for anyone who has ever wanted to know what it’s really like to be an author.]]> 365 Courtney Maum 1948226405 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.61 2020 Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book
author: Courtney Maum
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Business of Being a Writer]]> 35960731
The Business of Being a Writer offers the business education writers need but so rarely receive. It is meant for early-career writers looking to develop a realistic set of expectations about making money from their work or for working writers who want a better understanding of the industry. Writers will gain a comprehensive picture of how the publishing world works—from queries and agents to blogging and advertising—and will learn how they can best position themselves for success over the long term.]]> 313 Jane Friedman 022639316X Daniel 3 4.40 2018 The Business of Being a Writer
author: Jane Friedman
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The War of Art 1319 168 Steven Pressfield 0446691437 Daniel 2 A bit trite 3.95 2002 The War of Art
author: Steven Pressfield
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2002
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
A bit trite
]]> Bunny (Bunny, #1) 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 Daniel 2 comps 3.43 2019 Bunny (Bunny, #1)
author: Mona Awad
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: comps
review:

]]> Água Viva 13082435 88 Clarice Lispector 0811219909 Daniel 2 4.32 1973 Água Viva
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov]]> 1204063 Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
Sounds
Wingstroke
Gods
A Matter of Chance
The Seaport
Revenge
Beneficence
Details of A Sunset
The Thunderstorm
La Veneziana
Bachmann
The Dragon
Christmas
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
The Fight
The Return of Chorb
A Guide to Berlin
A Nursery Tale
Terror
Razor
The Passenger
The Doorbell
An Affair of Honor
The Christmas Story
The Potato Elf
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
A Bad Day
The Visit to the Museum
A Busy Man
Terra Incognita
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache
Music
Perfection
The Admiralty Spire
The Leonardo
In Memory of L.I. Shigaev
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Breaking the News
Torpid Smoke
Recruiting
A Slice of Life
Spring in Fialta
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Tyrants Destroyed
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Vasiliy Shishkov
Ultima Thule
Solus Rex
The Assistant Producer
That in Aleppo Once
A Forgotten Poet
Time and Ebb
Conversation Piece, 1945
Signs and Symbols
First Love
Scenes From the Life of A Double Monster
The Vane Sisters
Lance]]> 642 Vladimir Nabokov 0140132430 Daniel 5 to-read
The style also changes in the last paragraph, which is a parody of ----. The suggestion, then, is that the story is being "tampered" with or "hijacked" by the dead sisters. The narrative voice is made suspect as a result. The story becomes most interesting when you pose these questions: "To what extent do the Vane sisters intervene in the authorship of the narrator's story?" "To what extent is the narrative as a whole, rather than simply the last paragraph, suspect?" "What're the sisters' motives for "teasing" the narrator?"

Here's what makes the story so subtle, though. Nabokov has designed the story in such a way that it is essentially ambiguous. In the figure of the librarian, Porlock, we are offered an alternative model for interpreting what happened so that it might ust be an accient or miraculous misprint (like the misprint in Pale Fire), in which as there is no message but a mistake that looks like a flower. The story makes readers paranoid about overreading signs and symbols, but never fully leaves the final bi resolved.]]> 4.24 1995 The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2017/12/05
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:
A fascinating and whimsical narrative experiment that rewards multiple re-readings, as I think it's even more complex than is generally thought. Commentators have stressed how the first letter of each word in the final paragraph forms the acrostic, "Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil." The implication is that the narrator's sensual impression, in chapter one, on the coyly "drip-dripping icicles," with their elusive drops' shadows, and the glaring red meter's shadow, which he is struck by when D. pulls up in his car at the beginning of the story are posthumous messages from Cynthia and Sybil respectively--codes that the narrator fails to crack. Precisely when the narrator accuses Cynthia's ghostly visitation, which he mistakenly thinks comes in the form of a dream, of being "vague" and "disappointing," she hijacks his prose to convey a message he fails to spot. One wonders, also, if it was Cynthia who "informed" the narrator of her death by "leading him" to D., so that she could retrospectively claim "authorship" of his icicle experience. But the hidden message goes totally over his head, and the astute reader realizes that the joke's on the narrator.

The style also changes in the last paragraph, which is a parody of ----. The suggestion, then, is that the story is being "tampered" with or "hijacked" by the dead sisters. The narrative voice is made suspect as a result. The story becomes most interesting when you pose these questions: "To what extent do the Vane sisters intervene in the authorship of the narrator's story?" "To what extent is the narrative as a whole, rather than simply the last paragraph, suspect?" "What're the sisters' motives for "teasing" the narrator?"

Here's what makes the story so subtle, though. Nabokov has designed the story in such a way that it is essentially ambiguous. In the figure of the librarian, Porlock, we are offered an alternative model for interpreting what happened so that it might ust be an accient or miraculous misprint (like the misprint in Pale Fire), in which as there is no message but a mistake that looks like a flower. The story makes readers paranoid about overreading signs and symbols, but never fully leaves the final bi resolved.
]]> Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) 238958 The Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's é (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, é, and third for no one at all.

"Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. é, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's é is a triumph of the biographical form.]]> 480 Stacy Schiff 0330346733 Daniel 5 3.88 1999 Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
author: Stacy Schiff
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Honey & Spice 59088365 Introducing internationally bestselling author Bolu Babalola's dazzling debut novel, full of passion, humor, and heart, that centers on a young Black British woman who has no interest in love and unexpectedly finds herself caught up in a fake relationship with the man she warned her girls about

Sweet like plantain, hot like pepper. They taste the best when together...

Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission to make sure the women of the African-Caribbean Society at Whitewell University do not fall into the mess of "situationships", players, and heartbreak. But when the Queen of the Unbothered kisses Malakai Korede, the guy she just publicly denounced as "The Wastemen of Whitewell," in front of every Blackwellian on campus, she finds her show on the brink.

They're soon embroiled in a fake relationship to try and salvage their reputations and save their futures. Kiki has never surrendered her heart before, and a player like Malakai won't be the one to change that, no matter how charming he is or how electric their connection feels. But surprisingly entertaining study sessions and intimate, late-night talks at old-fashioned diners force Kiki to look beyond her own presumptions. Is she ready to open herself up to something deeper?

A gloriously funny and sparkling debut novel, Honey and Spice is full of delicious tension and romantic intrigue that will make you weak at the knees.]]> 368 Bolu Babalola 0063141485 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 3.90 2022 Honey & Spice
author: Bolu Babalola
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> The Love Hypothesis 56732449
That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding... six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.]]> 356 Ali Hazelwood 0593336828 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 4.11 2021 The Love Hypothesis
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Daniel 4
5-12 The Bertrams meet the Crawfords; Edmund grows fond of Mary, which makes Fanny envious; Mary borrows Fanny’s mare; Visit to Sotherton (Mary’s distaste for the clergy, Fanny left behind); It is arranged that when Sir Thomas returns, Maria will marry Rushworth and Edmund will take his vows; stargazing scene, in which Fanny appreciates the beauty of nature.

13-18 With the arrival of John Yates at Mansfield, the Bertram’s decide to put on a private theatrical of Inchbald’s “Lover’s Vows�; Fanny and Edmund disapprove, though Edmund agrees to act in the play; Henry flirts with the Bertram girls, inciting rivalry; Sir Thomas arrives to Mansfield earlier than he is expected.

19-23 The play is cancelled; Maria marries Rushworth (for his money and to prove she doesn’t need Henry); Fanny’s increased beauty is noticed; Fanny joins the others for dinner at the Grants.

24-31 Henry pursues Fanny (for his amusement); William visits Mansfield; William gives Fanny an Amber cross; Edmund and Mary give her necklaces of different sizes (for William’s ball): Edmund’s fits through the cross; At the ball, Sir Thomas displays Fanny’s docility to Henry; Henry, now in love with Fanny, gets William a promotion as a Lieutenant (as a kind of bribe); Fanny turns down Henry’s proposal.

32-37 Sir Thomas scold Fanny for refusing Henry (she does not tell him her full reasons); Henry vows to keep courting Fanny until she relents; Henry reads Shakespeare aloud at Mansfield; Edmund and Mary try to persuade Fanny to marry Henry; Sir Thomas has Fanny go back home for a while (in the hopes that it will persuade her to accept Henry’s offer).

38-43 Fanny goes to Portsmouth and is shocked by the poor-state of her family’s house and manners; She befriends her fourteen-year-old sister Susan; William leaves on H.M.S. Thrush; Henry visits the Prices and begins to grow on Fanny; Fanny worries that Edmund and Marry have already gotten married.

44-47 News of Tom’s illness (from drinking); news of Henry and Maria’s running off; News of Julia’s elopement with Yates; Mary tries to “hush up� her brother’s scandal in her infamous letter; Edmund falls out of love with Mary; Fanny returns to Mansfield.

48 Sir Thomas repents his overly indulgent parenting; Julia marries Yates; Tom convalescences and reforms; Henry doesn’t marry Maria; Sir Thomas realizes that Mrs. Norris’s spoiling his girls was damaging for their characters; Maria and Norris move to another country and live together; Mr. Rushworth gets a divorce; Edmund realizes he has loved Fanny all along, and they marry; Dr. Grant dies, and Fanny and Edmund move into the parsonage at Mansfield; Sir Thomas reforms; Susan moves to Mansfield; Mary Crawford lives with Mrs. Grant after Dr. Grant’s death, though she can’t ever fully take Edmund out of her head.
]]> 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2017/10/31
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves:
review:
1-4 Exposition; Fanny leaves her parents for Mansfield Park; The alienated Fanny finds a mentor in Edmund Bertram; After the death of Mr. Norris, Mrs. Norris moves into the White House on Mansfield Park; Sir Thomas and Tom leave for Antigua to figure out why they’re making such poor returns; Maria Bertram gets engaged to Mr. Rushworth; Out of necessity, the Crawfords move into with their half-sister Mrs. Grant, in the Mansfield Park vicarage.

5-12 The Bertrams meet the Crawfords; Edmund grows fond of Mary, which makes Fanny envious; Mary borrows Fanny’s mare; Visit to Sotherton (Mary’s distaste for the clergy, Fanny left behind); It is arranged that when Sir Thomas returns, Maria will marry Rushworth and Edmund will take his vows; stargazing scene, in which Fanny appreciates the beauty of nature.

13-18 With the arrival of John Yates at Mansfield, the Bertram’s decide to put on a private theatrical of Inchbald’s “Lover’s Vows�; Fanny and Edmund disapprove, though Edmund agrees to act in the play; Henry flirts with the Bertram girls, inciting rivalry; Sir Thomas arrives to Mansfield earlier than he is expected.

19-23 The play is cancelled; Maria marries Rushworth (for his money and to prove she doesn’t need Henry); Fanny’s increased beauty is noticed; Fanny joins the others for dinner at the Grants.

24-31 Henry pursues Fanny (for his amusement); William visits Mansfield; William gives Fanny an Amber cross; Edmund and Mary give her necklaces of different sizes (for William’s ball): Edmund’s fits through the cross; At the ball, Sir Thomas displays Fanny’s docility to Henry; Henry, now in love with Fanny, gets William a promotion as a Lieutenant (as a kind of bribe); Fanny turns down Henry’s proposal.

32-37 Sir Thomas scold Fanny for refusing Henry (she does not tell him her full reasons); Henry vows to keep courting Fanny until she relents; Henry reads Shakespeare aloud at Mansfield; Edmund and Mary try to persuade Fanny to marry Henry; Sir Thomas has Fanny go back home for a while (in the hopes that it will persuade her to accept Henry’s offer).

38-43 Fanny goes to Portsmouth and is shocked by the poor-state of her family’s house and manners; She befriends her fourteen-year-old sister Susan; William leaves on H.M.S. Thrush; Henry visits the Prices and begins to grow on Fanny; Fanny worries that Edmund and Marry have already gotten married.

44-47 News of Tom’s illness (from drinking); news of Henry and Maria’s running off; News of Julia’s elopement with Yates; Mary tries to “hush up� her brother’s scandal in her infamous letter; Edmund falls out of love with Mary; Fanny returns to Mansfield.

48 Sir Thomas repents his overly indulgent parenting; Julia marries Yates; Tom convalescences and reforms; Henry doesn’t marry Maria; Sir Thomas realizes that Mrs. Norris’s spoiling his girls was damaging for their characters; Maria and Norris move to another country and live together; Mr. Rushworth gets a divorce; Edmund realizes he has loved Fanny all along, and they marry; Dr. Grant dies, and Fanny and Edmund move into the parsonage at Mansfield; Sir Thomas reforms; Susan moves to Mansfield; Mary Crawford lives with Mrs. Grant after Dr. Grant’s death, though she can’t ever fully take Edmund out of her head.

]]> Victim 177185976
Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background—murdered drug dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity—can be a key to doors he didn’t even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer.

As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there’s not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn’t seem to care about Javi’s newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after Javi graduates, a viral essay transforms him from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his “unique perspective.� But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once Gio’s released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi’s charade, or will it all come crumbling down?

A satirical sendup of tear-jerking trauma plots with a tender portrait of friendship at its core, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.]]> 276 Andrew Boryga 0385549970 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 3.83 2024 Victim
author: Andrew Boryga
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> Save the Cat! Writes a Novel 32805475
Whether you’re writing your first novel or your seventeenth, Save the Cat! breaks down plot in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step method so you can write stories that resonate! This book can help you with any of the following:

Outlining a new novel
Revising an existing novel
Breaking out of the dreaded “writer’s block�
Fixing a “broken� novel
Reviewing a completed novel
Fleshing out/test driving a new idea to see if it “has legs�
Implementing feedback from agents and/or editors
Helping give constructive feedback to other writers

But above all else, SAVE THE CAT! WRITES A NOVEL will help you better understand the fundamentals and mechanics of plot, character transformation, and what makes a story work!]]> 320 Jessica Brody Daniel 0 to-read, comps 4.49 2018 Save the Cat! Writes a Novel
author: Jessica Brody
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> If We Were Villains 30319086
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]> 354 M.L. Rio 125009528X Daniel 0 to-read, comps 4.11 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> 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 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Daniel 0 to-read, comps 3.69 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read, comps
review:

]]> The Motorcycle Diaries 55224233 'A Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac' Washington Post

'It's true; Marxists just wanna have fun... a revolutionary bestseller' Guardian

At the age of twenty-three, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native Argentina to explore their continent, with only a single 1939 Norton motorcycle to carry them, nicknamed La Poderosa ('the powerful one').

They travelled not to visit the usual tourist attractions, but to meet ordinary people and understand Latin American life. In amidst the tales of youthful adventures - of women, wine, thrilling escapes and the power of friendship - the young Che also learns first-hand about poverty, philosophy and philosophy and forms himself into the man who would become the world's most famous and admired revolutionary and freedom fighter.

'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time]]> 157 Ernesto Che Guevara 0241465109 Daniel 2 3.90 1992 The Motorcycle Diaries
author: Ernesto Che Guevara
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Copenhagen 435488 132 Michael Frayn 0385720793 Daniel 3 3.90 1998 Copenhagen
author: Michael Frayn
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Leapfrog 17574843 Leapfrog depicts one summer in the life of a very poor young boy in post-revolutionary Havana in the late 50s. He has superhero fantasies, hangs around with the neighborhood kids, smokes cigarettes, tells very lame jokes: By the way, do you know who died? No. Someone who was alive. Laughter. The kids fight, discuss the mysteries of religion and sex, and play games such as leapfrog. So vivid and so very credible, Leapfrog reads as if Rosales had simply transcribed everything that he d heard or said for this one moving and touching book about a lost childhood.

Leapfrog was a finalist for Cuba s prestigious Casa de las Americas award in 1968. Years later, Rosales s sister told The Miami Herald that Rosales felt he hadn t won the prize because his book lacked sufficient leftist fervor, and that subtle critiques of cruel children and hypocritical adults throughout the playful recollections had clearly rankled state officials. In the end the novel never appeared in Cuba. It was first published in Spain in 1994, a year after Rosales s death.

"]]> 144 Guillermo Rosales 0811219410 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.71 1994 Leapfrog
author: Guillermo Rosales
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Things We Lost in the Fire 30375706
But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 192 Mariana Enríquez 045149511X Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.04 2016 Things We Lost in the Fire
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Rain God 452382 The Rain God is a breathtaking masterwork of contemporary literature.

Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona, the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled the bullets and blood of the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise.

In bold creative strokes, Islas paints on unforgettable family portrait of souls haunted by ghosts and madness--sinners torn by loves, lusts and dangerous desires. From gentle hearts plagued by violence and epic delusions to a child who con foretell the coming of rain in the sweet scent of angels, here is a rich and poignant tale of outcasts struggling to live and die with dignity ... and to hold onto their past while embracing an unsteady future.]]> 192 Arturo Islas 0380763931 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.96 1984 The Rain God
author: Arturo Islas
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought]]> 6661174 "If you read only one economics book this year, read this one.”—Larry Summers, Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council for President ObamaA must-read for students of economics, New Ideas from Dead Economists offers an entertaining and accessible introduction to the great economic thingers throughout history. Through the teachings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and more, renowned economist Todd Buchholz shows how these age-old ideas still apply to our modern world. In this revised edition, Buchholz offers an insightful and informed perspective on key economic issues in the new increasing demand for energy, the rise of China, international trade, aging populations, health care, and the effects of global warming. New Ideas from Dead Economists is a fascinating guide to understanding both the evolution of economic theory and our complex contemporary economy.]]> 372 Todd G. Buchholz 1101043717 Daniel 3 3.94 1989 New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought
author: Todd G. Buchholz
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2012/03/06
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The Empty Space 54509 144 Peter Brook 0684829576 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.22 1968 The Empty Space
author: Peter Brook
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part]]> 787895
Michael Shurtleff has been casting director for Broadway shows like Chicago and Becket and for films like The Graduate and Jesus Christ Superstar. His legendary course on auditioning has launched hundreds of successful careers. Now in this book he tells the all-important how for all aspiring actors, from the beginning student of acting to the proven talent trying out for that chance-in-a-million role!

Twelve guideposts for actors plus:
Style � Pace � Over-Acting � Distractions � Risks � Drama � Musical Theater � Comedy � Self-Rescue � Seduction � Eye Contact
. . . And more!]]> 288 Michael Shurtleff 0553272950 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.23 1978 Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part
author: Michael Shurtleff
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Respect for Acting 140502 � Publishers Weekly "Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting is not only pitched on a high artistic level but it is full of homely, practical information by a superb craftswoman. crafts-woman. An illuminating discussion of the standards and techniques of enlightened stage acting."
� Brooks Atkinson "Hagen adds to the large corpus of titles on acting with vivid dicta drawn from experience, skill, and a sense of personal and professional worth. Her principal asset in this treatment is her truly significant imagination. Her ‘object exercises� display a wealth of detail with which to stimulate the student preparing a scene for presentation."
� Library Journal "Respect for Acting is a simple, lucid and sympathetic statement of actors' problems in the theatre and basic tenets for their training wrought from the personal experience of a fine actress and teacher of acting."
� Harold Clurman "Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting…is a relatively small book. But within it Miss Hagen tells the young actor about as much as can be conveyed in print of his craft."
� Los Angeles Times "Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her."
� Fritz Weaver "This is a textbook for aspiring actors, but working thespians can profit much by it. Anyone with just a casual interest in the theater should also enjoy its behind-the-scenes flavor. Respect for Acting is certainly a special book, perhaps for a limited readership, but of its "How-To" kind I'd give it four curtain calls, and two hollers of "Author, Author
� King Features Syndicate]]> 227 Uta Hagen 0025473905 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.19 1973 Respect for Acting
author: Uta Hagen
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Technique of Acting 237329 156 Stella Adler 0553349325 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.15 1988 The Technique of Acting
author: Stella Adler
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> An Actor Prepares 94675 320 Constantin Stanislavski 0878309837 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.07 1936 An Actor Prepares
author: Constantin Stanislavski
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Juvenilia (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen)]]> 18060404 574 Jane Austen 1107044162 Daniel 4
Catherine, or the Bower

The story revolves around Catherine (“Kitty�) Percival, an orphan living with her censorious and forbidding aunt, Mrs. Percival. Before the story begins, she developed a strong friendship with the daughters of the local parson, Mr. Wynne. Kitty’s friendship with Cecilia and Mary Wynne is deeply rewarding. The girls talk about books and spend much of their time in the eponymous bower the three of them built together. The bower, then, becomes an emblem of Kitty’s friendship with the Wynne sisters. When Mr. and Mrs. Wynne suddenly die, their daughters and one son are forced to rely on other relatives. Cecilia Wynne moves to Bengal, where she is obliged to marry a Mr. Lascelles, who, though respectable, she is incapable of loving. Mary moves to Scotland, and is taken under the wing of the snobbish Mrs. Halifax; and Charles Wynne goes to sea. This means that Kitty finds herself suddenly all alone, with only her stifling aunt for company. She seeks solace in reading and reflecting in her beloved bower, which her aunt disapproves of. For the aunt, the bower is a space of dangerous self-indulgence, a Spenserian bower of bliss, and she at one point declares that she will destroy it, rather like a parodic Guyon. Kitty’s life changes when Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, the former of which is a member of parliament, move into the village of Chetwynde with their two children, Camilla and Edward Stanley. Kitty wants desperately to be friends with Camilla, but Camilla is frivolous, fashion-obsessed, and ill-educated. Despite her best intentions to like Camilla, she can’t help finding her ridiculous. Kitty’s relationship with Camilla becomes more detached and ironic. A ball is planned, but Kitty can't go because she has a painful toothache. Eventually the pain subsides, and she decides to attend the ball. In the meantime, Camilla’s brother, Edward Stanley, abruptly shows up the night the pompous Mr. Dudley hosts the ball. Edward is totally unlike his sister. He is handsome and clever. Kitty is intrigued and wishes to know him better. The two begin a flirtation, which torments the anxious Mrs. Percival. In courting Kitty, Edward tells his sister that his primary motive is that of provoking Kitty’s aunt. For this reason, he appears to be misleading Kitty in a possibly rakish way. One day, we learn that he has suddenly left the neighborhood to return to Lyon, as his father wishes. (The only reason he returned to England was so that he could be with a beloved mare of his that was ill.) Kitty curses the vanity of women and the inconstancy of man before stoically coping with the news, when Camilla tells Kitty that her brother is in love with her and regretted having left without saying goodbye. She tells her that he said she should tell Kitty not to get married before he returns from the continent, so there is a suggestion that he eventually wishes to propose to Kitty. Kitty retreats to her bower to think fondly over Edward, who she has forgiven of treachery. Camilla goes to London. Kitty agrees to correspond with her, although secretly her only motive for doing do is so she gain knowledge of Edward’s whereabouts and condition; unfortunately, all the girlish and frivolous Camilla writes about is fashion and dress. We learn that Mrs. Percival has decided to allow Kitty to go to Exeter to see a company of strolling players, but there’s a problem: a male escort can’t be found. The story is abruptly left off, unfinished, without our knowing whether Edward’s motives toward Kitty are honorable or dubious.

Evelyn

Mr. Frederick Gower stops at the idyllic village of Evelyn on his way to the country estate of his sister’s (Miss Rose Gower’s) beloved Henry’s aristocratic parents, who have forbidden that their son Henry marry the humbly born Rose and sent him and the family chaplain on a voyage to the Isle of Wight so that he can forget her. Sadly, the ship capsizes and he is drowned on the voyage—although Rose doesn’t learn this until later. Frederick Gower’s purpose, in journeying to the castle, we later learn is to fetch a portrait of Henry from his parents so that he can take it to his sister Rose and this can help her better cope with her sorrowful love. Strangely—and this is why the story seems to read like a dream almost—he forgets about his reason for journeying to Henry’s family estate when he stops at the neighboring village of Evelyn. He stops at an ale house, asks the landlady, a Sarah Willis, if there is a house somewhere in the village he can have, enraptured by the Edenic beauty of the place. She directs him to the gorgeous house of a Mr. and Mrs. Webb, who are so implausibly hospitable that they let him keep their house and marry their daughter Maria Webb. As if totally having forgotten his reason for journeying to the area, Frederick settles down to a peaceful domestic existence with his beloved wife, Maria Webb. One day he and his wife are strolling about the garden when they see a rose on the ground, which fell from one of their garden’s several “rose trees.� This immediately reminds Frederick of his sister Rose. He is about to set off, when he receives a letter from his family at Carlisle, informing him that Rose has died of grief. With no need for Henry’s portrait anymore, Frederick journeys to his parent’s estate on an even stranger mission: to ask them if, in theory, if his son were alive, they would let them marry, now that they have seen how disastrous the consequences of their initial prohibition have been. Henry’s father (correctly) finds the question ridiculous, and Frederick curses them. When he returns to his idyllic home in Evelyn, he discovers—again, almost as if this were a dream—that his wife Maria has died from grief during his three hours� absence. Frederick returns home, where he is shocked to learn that his sister Rose is alive and engaged to a Mr. Davenport. We learn that the reason she sent the deceptive letter to Frederick, informing him of her supposed death, was because she still hadn’t discovered that Henry had died and was trying to mislead his parents (through him) into allowing the marriage after realizing the distress it could theoretically cause her. But she soon finds out about Henry’s death and, somewhat surprisingly, quickly finds herself another lover, the Mr. Davenport she ends up marrying at the end of the story. Frederick himself, in an odd conclusion, marries Sarah Willis, the landlady of the alehouse he stops at when first arriving at Evelyn. The story, then, appears to center on how two highly and ridiculously romanticized versions of love are supplanted by more practical and earthbound alliances. The story also weaves and parodies gothic, sentimental, and pastoral tropes into a hybridic narrative.

Love and Friendship

The plot of this rollicking novella is extremely intricate and implausible—and self-consciously so, as it is a parody of sentimental and amatory fiction. The story is framed as a didactic narrative, in which the central character, Laura, confides the story of her misfortunes to her childhood friend Isabella’s daughter Marianne, so that the latter may draw lessons from the story. A rough outline: Laura marries the wealthy Sir Edward, whose father wants him to marry the wealthy Lady Dorothea. The newlywed Edward and Laura visit the former’s close friend Augustus, who is married to a woman named Sophia. Sophia and Laura become inseparable friends. Augusts is arrested for unpaid debts, and Edward goes to see if he can help him. Sophia and Laura turn out to be cousins. We discover this in a highly implausible reunion scene in which Lord St. Clair, their grandfather, happens to run into them and two other grandchildren—Philander and Gustavus—at the same time. St. Clair gives his four grandchildren 50 pounds apiece, but the boys end up stealing their female cousins� money. Meanwhile, Laura and Sophia visit the latter’s cousin, Macdonald, who is trying to force his daughter Janetta to marry the wealthy Graham, though she is in love with Captain M’Kenzie. Sophia and Laura persuade Janetta to marry her beloved Captain M’Kenzie, and she does. Sophia and Laura find their respective husbands Augustus and Edward have died in a carriage crash. Sophia dies of grief. Laura takes a carriage ride back home in which she discovers she is being taken by Gustavus, Philander, Sir Edward Sr., and the snobbish Augusta, Edward Jr.’s sister. In the end, we discover that Sir Edward Sr. marries Lady Dorothea for her money, and the mercenary Augusta marries Graham for his money, and the thieving Philander and Gustavus become actors in London. Laura spends the rest of her days in a romantic and remote village, where she contemplates the death of her father, mother, husbands, and friend Sophia.]]> 4.50 1787 Juvenilia (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen)
author: Jane Austen
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1787
rating: 4
read at: 2018/01/24
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
The juvenilia is fairly extensive, and divided into three volumes. Following are summaries of three notable pieces:

Catherine, or the Bower

The story revolves around Catherine (“Kitty�) Percival, an orphan living with her censorious and forbidding aunt, Mrs. Percival. Before the story begins, she developed a strong friendship with the daughters of the local parson, Mr. Wynne. Kitty’s friendship with Cecilia and Mary Wynne is deeply rewarding. The girls talk about books and spend much of their time in the eponymous bower the three of them built together. The bower, then, becomes an emblem of Kitty’s friendship with the Wynne sisters. When Mr. and Mrs. Wynne suddenly die, their daughters and one son are forced to rely on other relatives. Cecilia Wynne moves to Bengal, where she is obliged to marry a Mr. Lascelles, who, though respectable, she is incapable of loving. Mary moves to Scotland, and is taken under the wing of the snobbish Mrs. Halifax; and Charles Wynne goes to sea. This means that Kitty finds herself suddenly all alone, with only her stifling aunt for company. She seeks solace in reading and reflecting in her beloved bower, which her aunt disapproves of. For the aunt, the bower is a space of dangerous self-indulgence, a Spenserian bower of bliss, and she at one point declares that she will destroy it, rather like a parodic Guyon. Kitty’s life changes when Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, the former of which is a member of parliament, move into the village of Chetwynde with their two children, Camilla and Edward Stanley. Kitty wants desperately to be friends with Camilla, but Camilla is frivolous, fashion-obsessed, and ill-educated. Despite her best intentions to like Camilla, she can’t help finding her ridiculous. Kitty’s relationship with Camilla becomes more detached and ironic. A ball is planned, but Kitty can't go because she has a painful toothache. Eventually the pain subsides, and she decides to attend the ball. In the meantime, Camilla’s brother, Edward Stanley, abruptly shows up the night the pompous Mr. Dudley hosts the ball. Edward is totally unlike his sister. He is handsome and clever. Kitty is intrigued and wishes to know him better. The two begin a flirtation, which torments the anxious Mrs. Percival. In courting Kitty, Edward tells his sister that his primary motive is that of provoking Kitty’s aunt. For this reason, he appears to be misleading Kitty in a possibly rakish way. One day, we learn that he has suddenly left the neighborhood to return to Lyon, as his father wishes. (The only reason he returned to England was so that he could be with a beloved mare of his that was ill.) Kitty curses the vanity of women and the inconstancy of man before stoically coping with the news, when Camilla tells Kitty that her brother is in love with her and regretted having left without saying goodbye. She tells her that he said she should tell Kitty not to get married before he returns from the continent, so there is a suggestion that he eventually wishes to propose to Kitty. Kitty retreats to her bower to think fondly over Edward, who she has forgiven of treachery. Camilla goes to London. Kitty agrees to correspond with her, although secretly her only motive for doing do is so she gain knowledge of Edward’s whereabouts and condition; unfortunately, all the girlish and frivolous Camilla writes about is fashion and dress. We learn that Mrs. Percival has decided to allow Kitty to go to Exeter to see a company of strolling players, but there’s a problem: a male escort can’t be found. The story is abruptly left off, unfinished, without our knowing whether Edward’s motives toward Kitty are honorable or dubious.

Evelyn

Mr. Frederick Gower stops at the idyllic village of Evelyn on his way to the country estate of his sister’s (Miss Rose Gower’s) beloved Henry’s aristocratic parents, who have forbidden that their son Henry marry the humbly born Rose and sent him and the family chaplain on a voyage to the Isle of Wight so that he can forget her. Sadly, the ship capsizes and he is drowned on the voyage—although Rose doesn’t learn this until later. Frederick Gower’s purpose, in journeying to the castle, we later learn is to fetch a portrait of Henry from his parents so that he can take it to his sister Rose and this can help her better cope with her sorrowful love. Strangely—and this is why the story seems to read like a dream almost—he forgets about his reason for journeying to Henry’s family estate when he stops at the neighboring village of Evelyn. He stops at an ale house, asks the landlady, a Sarah Willis, if there is a house somewhere in the village he can have, enraptured by the Edenic beauty of the place. She directs him to the gorgeous house of a Mr. and Mrs. Webb, who are so implausibly hospitable that they let him keep their house and marry their daughter Maria Webb. As if totally having forgotten his reason for journeying to the area, Frederick settles down to a peaceful domestic existence with his beloved wife, Maria Webb. One day he and his wife are strolling about the garden when they see a rose on the ground, which fell from one of their garden’s several “rose trees.� This immediately reminds Frederick of his sister Rose. He is about to set off, when he receives a letter from his family at Carlisle, informing him that Rose has died of grief. With no need for Henry’s portrait anymore, Frederick journeys to his parent’s estate on an even stranger mission: to ask them if, in theory, if his son were alive, they would let them marry, now that they have seen how disastrous the consequences of their initial prohibition have been. Henry’s father (correctly) finds the question ridiculous, and Frederick curses them. When he returns to his idyllic home in Evelyn, he discovers—again, almost as if this were a dream—that his wife Maria has died from grief during his three hours� absence. Frederick returns home, where he is shocked to learn that his sister Rose is alive and engaged to a Mr. Davenport. We learn that the reason she sent the deceptive letter to Frederick, informing him of her supposed death, was because she still hadn’t discovered that Henry had died and was trying to mislead his parents (through him) into allowing the marriage after realizing the distress it could theoretically cause her. But she soon finds out about Henry’s death and, somewhat surprisingly, quickly finds herself another lover, the Mr. Davenport she ends up marrying at the end of the story. Frederick himself, in an odd conclusion, marries Sarah Willis, the landlady of the alehouse he stops at when first arriving at Evelyn. The story, then, appears to center on how two highly and ridiculously romanticized versions of love are supplanted by more practical and earthbound alliances. The story also weaves and parodies gothic, sentimental, and pastoral tropes into a hybridic narrative.

Love and Friendship

The plot of this rollicking novella is extremely intricate and implausible—and self-consciously so, as it is a parody of sentimental and amatory fiction. The story is framed as a didactic narrative, in which the central character, Laura, confides the story of her misfortunes to her childhood friend Isabella’s daughter Marianne, so that the latter may draw lessons from the story. A rough outline: Laura marries the wealthy Sir Edward, whose father wants him to marry the wealthy Lady Dorothea. The newlywed Edward and Laura visit the former’s close friend Augustus, who is married to a woman named Sophia. Sophia and Laura become inseparable friends. Augusts is arrested for unpaid debts, and Edward goes to see if he can help him. Sophia and Laura turn out to be cousins. We discover this in a highly implausible reunion scene in which Lord St. Clair, their grandfather, happens to run into them and two other grandchildren—Philander and Gustavus—at the same time. St. Clair gives his four grandchildren 50 pounds apiece, but the boys end up stealing their female cousins� money. Meanwhile, Laura and Sophia visit the latter’s cousin, Macdonald, who is trying to force his daughter Janetta to marry the wealthy Graham, though she is in love with Captain M’Kenzie. Sophia and Laura persuade Janetta to marry her beloved Captain M’Kenzie, and she does. Sophia and Laura find their respective husbands Augustus and Edward have died in a carriage crash. Sophia dies of grief. Laura takes a carriage ride back home in which she discovers she is being taken by Gustavus, Philander, Sir Edward Sr., and the snobbish Augusta, Edward Jr.’s sister. In the end, we discover that Sir Edward Sr. marries Lady Dorothea for her money, and the mercenary Augusta marries Graham for his money, and the thieving Philander and Gustavus become actors in London. Laura spends the rest of her days in a romantic and remote village, where she contemplates the death of her father, mother, husbands, and friend Sophia.
]]> <![CDATA[Guide to Literary Agents 30th Edition]]> 59716098 THE BEST RESOURCE AVAILABLE FOR FINDING A LITERARY AGENT

No matter what you're writing--fiction or nonfiction, books for adults or children--you need a literary agent to get the best book deal possible from a traditional publisher. Guide to Literary Agents 2019 is your go-to resource for finding that literary agent and earning a contract from a reputable publisher. Along with listing information for more than 1,000 agents who represent writers and their books, the 28th edition of GLA includes: A one-year subscription to the literary agent content on WritersMarket.com (NOTE: the subscription comes with the print version ONLY). The key elements of a successful nonfiction book proposal. Informative articles on crafting the perfect synopsis and detailing what agents are looking for in the ideal client--written by actual literary agents. Plus, debut authors share their varied paths to finding success and their first book publications.
+Includes exclusive access to the webinar "Land the Right Agent for Your Writing Career" by GLA and Writer's Market editor Robert Lee Brewer
]]> 310 The Writer's Digest 0593332105 Daniel 3 4.18 Guide to Literary Agents 30th Edition
author: The Writer's Digest
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beach Treasures of the Gulf Coast]]> 5621380 56 S. Peter Dance 0976956756 Daniel 4 4.00 Beach Treasures of the Gulf Coast
author: S. Peter Dance
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Family Happiness 8477722 96 Leo Tolstoy 140997863X Daniel 5 3.72 1859 Family Happiness
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1859
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/17
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Philoctetes 806079
En route to fight the Trojan War, the Greek army has abandoned Philoctetes, after the smell of his festering wound, mysteriously received from a snakebite at a shrine on a small island off Lemnos, makes it unbearable to keep him on ship. Ten years later, an oracle makes it clear that the war cannot be won without the assistance of Philoctetes and his famous bow, inherited from Hercules himself. Philoctetes focuses on the attempt of Neoptolemus and the hero Odysseus to persuade the bowman to sail with them to Troy. First, though, they must assuage his bitterness over having been abandoned, and then win his trust. But how should they do this—through trickery, or with the truth? To what extent do the ends justify the means? To what degree should personal integrity be compromised for the sake of public duty? These are among the questions that Sophocles puts forward in this, one of his most morally complex and penetrating plays.]]> 128 Sophocles 0195136578 Daniel 3 3.79 -409 Philoctetes
author: Sophocles
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.79
book published: -409
rating: 3
read at: 2014/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[From Sandbar to Sophistication:: The Story of Sunny Isles Beach (Vintage Images)]]> 2247425 192 Seth H. Bramson 1596292016 Daniel 3 3.50 2007 From Sandbar to Sophistication:: The Story of Sunny Isles Beach (Vintage Images)
author: Seth H. Bramson
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
The text reads like glib propaganda for the city. The photos are great.
]]> <![CDATA[The Blazing World and Other Writings]]> 354620
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 272 Margaret Cavendish 0140433724 Daniel 2 3.26 The Blazing World and Other Writings
author: Margaret Cavendish
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.26
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2014/03/06
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf]]> 14946
Woolf continually used stories and sketches to experiment with narrative models and themes for her novels. This collection of nearly fifty pieces brings together the contents of two published volumes, A Haunted House and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party; a number of uncollected stories; and several previously unpublished pieces. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Dick.]]> 345 Virginia Woolf 0156212501 Daniel 4 4.15 1921 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1921
rating: 4
read at: 2010/11/17
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Miami Then and Now (Then & Now)]]> 550697 144 Arva Moore Parks 1571458522 Daniel 4 4.19 2002 Miami Then and Now (Then & Now)
author: Arva Moore Parks
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition]]> 394695 A deluxe edition of Whitman's crowning achievement, with an introductory essay by Harold Bloom

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
When Walt Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass in July 1855, he altered the course of literary history. One of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, it redefined the rules of poetry while describing the soul of the American character. Throughout his great career, Whitman continuously revised, expanded, and republished Leaves of Grass, but as Harold Bloom reminds us, the book that matters most is the 1855 original. In celebration of the poem’s 150th anniversary, Penguin Classics proudly presents the 1855 text in its original and complete form, with a specially commissioned introductory essay by Harold Bloom.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.

]]> 160 Walt Whitman 014303927X Daniel 0 to-read 4.25 1855 Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition
author: Walt Whitman
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1855
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Plot (The Book Series, #1)]]> 55315487 Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]> 320 Jean Hanff Korelitz 125079076X Daniel 2 3.75 2021 The Plot (The Book Series, #1)
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/07/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick]]> 318531
He was a hermit. He refused to fly and wouldn't be driven at more than thirty miles an hour. He avoided having his picture taken and was terrified of being assassinated. As a filmmaker, he was obsessed with perfection. He insisted on total control of every facet of the process. Simple scenes required one hundred takes. No wonder he made only six movies in the past thirty-five years.

But what was he really like?

For more than two years, Frederic Raphael collaborated closely with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of what was to be the director's final movie, Eyes Wide Shut. Over time, as his professional caution was replaced by a certain affection, Kubrick lowered his guard for Raphael as he never had with journalists or biographers, to reveal much about his early life in the cinema and of the reverses and humiliations he had to endure. They spoke for hours about a variety of subjects, from Julius Caesar to the Holocaust, from Kubrick's views about other directors to reminiscences of the many stars with whom both men had worked (or nearly worked)--Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, James Mason, Peter Sellers, Marisa Berenson, Sterling Hayden, Marlon Brando, and Gregory Peck.

Here, with his own distinctly cinematic style, Raphael chronicles their often fiery exchanges, capturing Kubrick's voice as no one else could. Disdaining false veneration, he opens our eyes to the mind and art of a truly complex and hitherto elusive twentieth-century genius.]]> 190 Frederic Raphael 0345437764 Daniel 5 3.22 1999 Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick
author: Frederic Raphael
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
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A lot of irritatingly myopic reviews about this book. The people who read this as a defamation of Kubrick or simplification of Kubrick strike me as just kind of stupid, frankly. Obviously, Kubrick is more gifted than the writer here. Duh. Kubrick doesn't need to be defended, and this guy--who clearly admires Kubrick intensely--doesn't need to be attacked. The book in invaluable as an account of a screenwriter's experience working with Kubrick on one of the master's greatest films. Duh there're going to be asymmetries and tensions there. Duh the writer's angle of vision is slanted here. But this is an invaluable perspective. I'm really just stunned by how simplistic and mindlessly defensive some of these reviews are.
]]> Dream Story 157409 Like his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud, the doctor and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was a bold pioneer in exploring the dark tangled roots of human sexuality.

Arthur Schnitzler is probably most famous for La Ronde, a play too scandalous to publish or perform in his own lifetime but whose daisy-chain of couplings inspired both Max Ophuls's classic film and David Hare's modernized version, The Blue Room, which played to sell-out audiences in the West End and on Broadway. Dream Story is an equally erotic work, in which a married couple are first traumatized and then achieve a new depth of understanding by confessing to each other their sexual fantasies, dream-like adventures and might-have-beens . . .

Taking us on a guided tour of Vienna's seedy cafés, red-light district, decadent villas, hospitals and morgue, Schnitzler brilliantly uncovers the violence and depravity lurking beneath the surface of civilized society.

Dream Story is the inspiration for Eyes Wide Shut, co-written by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael.]]> 117 Arthur Schnitzler 0141182245 Daniel 3 3.86 1926 Dream Story
author: Arthur Schnitzler
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1926
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Latin American Writers at Work (Modern Library Paperbacks)]]> 272674 Paris Review Writers at Work series, Latin American Writers at Work is a thundering collection of interviews with some of the most important and acclaimed Latin American writers of our time. These fascinating conversations were compiled from the annals of The Paris Review and include a new, lyrical Introduction by Nobel Prize–winning author Derek Walcott.]]> 352 George Plimpton 0679773495 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.29 2003 Latin American Writers at Work (Modern Library Paperbacks)
author: George Plimpton
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/27
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]]> In Patagonia 7103634 260 Bruce Chatwin Daniel 2 3.34 1977 In Patagonia
author: Bruce Chatwin
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1977
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/06/11
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Chatwin’s beginning to experiment with some of the narrative strategies he used to greater effect in The Songlines. An apprentice work. The text is structured as a series of vignettes, snapshots, cameos. In particular, there’s a gallery of eccentric characters and exiles, mainly Europeans, mainly Brits and Germans, “gringos,� that crowds the book. Chatwin’s overarching quest, his quest to find a replacement for the piece of supposed brontosaurus flesh (Mylodon flesh according to father Palacios) that initially attracted him to Patagonia, is an interesting if slightly flimsy framing device. The stakes of the quest are largely personal, as opposed to the larger existential stakes of the quest chatwin embarks on in The Songlines, his most sophisticated work. Ultimately, the sketches don’t add up in this book in the way they do in the latter book. This book has the lapidary prose, but not the traction and momentum of The Songlines.
]]> <![CDATA[Stanley Kubrick and Me: Thirty Years at His Side]]> 25898599
Stanley Kubrick, the director of a string of timeless movies from Lolita and Dr. Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and others, has always been depicted by the media as the Howard Hughes of filmmakers, a weird artist obsessed with his work and privacy to the point of madness. But who was he really? Emilio D'Alessandro lets us see. A former Formula Ford driver who was a minicab chauffeur in London during the Swinging Sixties, he took a job driving a giant phallus through the city that became his introduction to the director. Honest, reliable, and ready to take on any task, Emilio found his way into Kubrick's neurotic, obsessive heart. He became his personal assistant, his right-hand man and confidant, working for him from A Clockwork Orange until Kubrick's death in 1999.

Emilio was the silent guy in the room when the script for The Shining was discussed. He still has the coat Jack Nicholson used in the movie. He was an extra on the set of Eyes Wide Shut , Kubrick's last movie. He knew all the actors and producers Kubrick worked with; he observed firsthand Kubrick's working methods down to the smallest detail. Making no claim of expertise in cinematography but with plenty of anecdotes, he offers a completely fresh perspective on the artist and a warm, affecting portrait of a generous, kind, caring man who was a perfectionist in work and life.]]> 384 Emilio D'Alessandro 1628726695 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.12 2012 Stanley Kubrick and Me: Thirty Years at His Side
author: Emilio D'Alessandro
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Forest Primeval: The Geologic History of Wood and Petrified Forests (Yale Peabody Museum Series) by Leo J. Hickey (2010-07-27)]]> 127262554 0 Leo J. Hickey Daniel 0 currently-reading 0.0 2003 The Forest Primeval: The Geologic History of Wood and Petrified Forests (Yale Peabody Museum Series) by Leo J. Hickey (2010-07-27)
author: Leo J. Hickey
name: Daniel
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/09
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]]> Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.75 2017 Tender Is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/09
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]]> The Gilded Years 60376822 Acaptivating historical novel based on the true story of Anita Hemmings, the first Black student to attend the prestigious Vassar College by � passing as white. For fans ofThe Vanishing Half and The Gilded Age.SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Since childhood, Anita Hemmings has longed to attend the country’s most exclusive school for women, Vassar College. Now, a bright, beautiful senior in the class of 1897, she is hiding a secret that would have banned her from Anita is the only African-American student ever to attend Vassar. With her olive complexion and dark hair, she has successfully passed as white, but now finds herself rooming with Lottie Taylor, an heiress of one of New York’s most prominent families. Though Anita has kept herself at a distance from her classmates, Lottie’s sphere of influence is inescapable, her energy irresistible, and the two become fast friends. Pulled into her elite world, Anita learns what it’s like to be treated as a wealthy, educated white woman � the person everyone believes her to be � and even finds herself in a heady romance with a well-off Harvard student. But when Lottie becomes curious about Anita’s family the situation becomes particularly perilous, and as Anita’s graduation looms, those closest to her will be the ones to dangerously threaten her secret. Set against the vibrant backdrop of the Gilded Age, an era when old money traditions collided with modern ideas, The Gilded Years is a story of hope, sacrifice and betrayal � and a gripping account of how one woman dared to risk everything for the chance at a better life. ‘Smart and thoughtful � A must-read� PopSugar ‘Insightfully grapples with complex and compelling issues� Booklist ‘The beautiful and the damned takes on a whole new meaning � A poignant imagining inside the most complex survival passing. With the grandeur of the Gilded Age intertwined with romance and suspense, you won’t be able to put this period piece down until you know how her story ends.’�Vanity Fair]]> 400 Karin Tanabe 1761105159 Daniel 3 3.93 2016 The Gilded Years
author: Karin Tanabe
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Reptiles: The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger's Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale]]> 7680796
Distributed for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History]]> 84 Rosemary Volpe 0912532769 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.83 2010 The Age of Reptiles: The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger's Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale
author: Rosemary Volpe
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life]]> 17465707 230 Dani Shapiro 0802121403 Daniel 2 4.19 2013 Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
author: Dani Shapiro
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Delphi -The Oracle and Its Role in the Political and Social Life of the Ancient Greeks]]> 166514842 0 Ioanna K. Konstantinou Daniel 3 4.00 Delphi -The Oracle and Its Role in the Political and Social Life of the Ancient Greeks
author: Ioanna K. Konstantinou
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.00
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rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tower of the Winds at Athens]]> 107309944 0 Hermann J. KIENAST 9602146141 Daniel 2 2.00 The Tower of the Winds at Athens
author: Hermann J. KIENAST
name: Daniel
average rating: 2.00
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rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Guide to the Prehistoric Town of Akrotiri]]> 56572536 The eruption of the volcano stopped the town's life and the volcanic ashes buried the entire site protecting, however, the buildings and their contents.
What has been preserved by nature is our obligation today, by all means, to respect and protect. Cultural heritage is a process of memory and oblivion that characterizes every human society. Akrotiri - this heritage site - is a living monument & record of certain events. And this is the real connection to our past, to our ancestors, to our origin of existence.]]> 105 Nikos Psarros 9609393063 Daniel 2 3.50 Guide to the Prehistoric Town of Akrotiri
author: Nikos Psarros
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.50
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rating: 2
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]]> Pet Sematary 11741501
Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago.

Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive note of threat.

But behind the house and away from the road: that was safe. Just a carefully clear path up into the woods where generations of local children have processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial.

A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you, sweating with fear and foreboding...]]> 424 Stephen King Daniel 1 4.09 1983 Pet Sematary
author: Stephen King
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1983
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/21
date added: 2024/04/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Several Short Sentences About Writing]]> 13155290 you write.

Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed.

An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.]]> 224 Verlyn Klinkenborg 0307266346 Daniel 3 4.13 2012 Several Short Sentences About Writing
author: Verlyn Klinkenborg
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> Novelist as a Vocation 60387307 A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author’s own novels.

Haruki Murakami’s myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing.]]> 224 Haruki Murakami 0451494644 Daniel 3 3.90 2015 Novelist as a Vocation
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> Life Godzilla Magazine 2021 142340515 0 Various Daniel 3 4.33 Life Godzilla Magazine 2021
author: Various
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 3
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]]> Persians 1152996 The Persians, Aeschylus' earliest surviving tragedy, holds a fascination both for readers of Greek drama and Greek history. Not only is it the earliest existing play in the Western tradition, it is drawn directly from the playwright's own experiences at the battle of Salamis, making it the only account of the Persian Wars composed by an eyewitness. And as pure tragedy, it is a masterpiece. Aeschylus tells the story of the war from the Persian point of view, and his pride in the great victory of Greeks is tempered with a real compassion for Xerxes and his vanquished nation. Lembke and Harrington have rendered this stunning work in a modern translation that loses none of the original's dramatic juxtaposition of serenity and violence, hope and despair.
]]> 144 Aeschylus 0195070089 Daniel 5 3.42 -472 Persians
author: Aeschylus
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.42
book published: -472
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/06
date added: 2024/03/30
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]]> A Writer's Diary 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—the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision—of 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.”� New York Times Book Review

Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.]]> 355 Virginia Woolf 0156027917 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.16 1953 A Writer's Diary
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Woodcutters (Vintage International)]]> 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—a 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 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.18 1984 Woodcutters (Vintage International)
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath]]> 11623
A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.]]> 732 Sylvia Plath 0385720254 Daniel 5 4.27 2000 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> The Cannibal Manifesto 2855790 11 Oswald de Andrade Daniel 3 3.66 1928 The Cannibal Manifesto
author: Oswald de Andrade
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> The Secret of Hanging Rock 866452 58 Joan Lindsay 020715550X Daniel 3 3.19 1987 The Secret of Hanging Rock
author: Joan Lindsay
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> A Simple Heart 398155 A Simple Heart will remind many why Gustave Flaubert was acclaimed as the first great master of realism. But this heart-breaking tale of a simple servant woman and her life-long search for love meant something else to Flaubert. Written near the end of his life, the work was meant to be a tribute to George Sand—who died before it was finished—and was written in answer to an argument the two were having over the importance of realism. Although the tale displays his virtuosic gift for telling detail, and is based on one of his actual servants, Flaubert said it exemplified his belief that "Beauty is the object of all my efforts." This sparkling new translation by Charlotte Mandell shows how impeccably Flaubert achieved his goal.]]> 62 Gustave Flaubert 0974607886 Daniel 5 Extremely beautiful. 3.58 1877 A Simple Heart
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1877
rating: 5
read at: 2018/07/15
date added: 2024/02/19
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Extremely beautiful.
]]> <![CDATA[Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition]]> 22929485
Brazil, according to no less an observer than Elizabeth Bishop, is a place where poets hold a place of honor. "Among men, the name of 'poet' is sometimes used as a compliment or term of affection, even if the person referred to is . . . not a poet at all. One of the most famous twentieth-century poets, Manuel Bandeira, was presented with a permanent parking space in front of his apartment house in Rio de Janeiro, with an enamelled sign POETA-although he never owned a car and didn't know how to drive." In a culture like this, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of the nation's greatest poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

"World so wide, world so large, / my heart's even larger": Drummond was a master of transforming the ordinary world, through language, into the sublime. His poems--musical protests, twisted hymns, dissonant celebrations of imperfection--are transcriptions of life itself, recorded by a magnanimous outcast. As he put it in his "Seven-Sided Poem": "When I was born, one of those twisted / angels who live in the shadows said: / 'Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!"

Multitudinous Heart , the most generous selection of Drummond's poems available in English, gathers work from the various phases of this restless, brilliant modernist's career. Richard Zenith's authoritative selection and beautifully rendered translation bring us a more vivid and surprising poet than we knew--one of the century's greatest.]]> 432 Carlos Drummond de Andrade 0374280703 Daniel 0 currently-reading 4.29 2015 Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition
author: Carlos Drummond de Andrade
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> The Bed Book 733162 40 Sylvia Plath 0316712280 Daniel 3 4.24 1976 The Bed Book
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1976
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom: A Story]]> 42980964
Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman's fateful train journey.

Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like "guilt, and guilt, and guilt" these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.

"But what is the ninth kingdom?" she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. "It is the kingdom of the frozen will," comes the reply. "There is no going back."

Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.]]> 64 Sylvia Plath 006294083X Daniel 4 3.97 2019 Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom: A Story
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Pompeii (Guide-Books to Museums and Monuments in Italy, No. 3)]]> 32814640 Pompeii 163 Amedeo Maiuri Daniel 5 3.80 1957 Pompeii (Guide-Books to Museums and Monuments in Italy, No. 3)
author: Amedeo Maiuri
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1957
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/01/09
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Amedeo Maiuri was the chief archeologist of the Pompeii and Herculaneum excavations from 1924-61, one of the site's greatest periods of discovery and innovation--thanks to fascist funding as it turns out. Fascinating from a historiographical perspective.
]]> Bird by Bird 12543 A newer edition of this title can be found here.

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From "Getting Started,' with "Short Assignments," through "Shitty First Drafts," "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue." all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses "Writers Block," "Writing Groups," and "Publication." Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.

If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.

]]> 238 Anne Lamott Daniel 2 4.24 1994 Bird by Bird
author: Anne Lamott
name: Daniel
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1994
rating: 2
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date added: 2023/12/26
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]]> El burlador de Sevilla 63627
El don Juan de Tirso, que seduce a doña Isabela haciéndose pasar por su marido, inspiró posteriormente a otros autores como Molière, Verdi o Zorrilla. Sin embargo, este don Juan original, padre de todos los demás, es curiosamente el menos conocido.]]> 192 Tirso de Molina 8423918866 Daniel 0 currently-reading 3.62 1616 El burlador de Sevilla
author: Tirso de Molina
name: Daniel
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1616
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/07
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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