en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:47:51 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 48616787 336 Elena Ferrante 1609455916 Nell 0 currently-reading 3.67 2019
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Nell
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 61889841 480 Kate Briggs 1804270326 Nell 0 4.08 2023
author: Kate Briggs
name: Nell
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 75670841 A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,�� but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.]]> 229 Teju Cole 0812997123 Nell 0 3.66 2023
author: Teju Cole
name: Nell
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> 13547504 Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.]]> 962 Andrew Solomon Nell 5 4.25 2012
author: Andrew Solomon
name: Nell
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 36402034 258 Philip K. Dick Nell 0 4.16 1968
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Nell
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 57850253
Growing up, Jenny Pentland’s life was a literal sitcom. Many of the storylines for her mother’s smash hit series, Roseanne , were drawn from Pentland’s early family life in working-class Denver. But that was only the beginning of the drama. Roseanne Barr’s success as a comedian catapulted the family from the Rockies to star-studded Hollywood—with its toxic culture of money, celebrity, and prying tabloids that was destabilizing for a child in grade school.�� By adolescence, Jenny struggled with anxiety and eating issues. Her parents and new stepfather, struggling to help, responded by sending Jenny and her siblings on a grand tour of the self-help movement of the ��80s—from fat camps to brat camps, wilderness survival programs to drug rehab clinics (even though Jenny didn’t take drugs). Becoming an adult, all Jenny wanted was to get married and have kids, despite Roseanne’s admonishments not to limit herself to being just a wife and mother.�� In this scathingly funny and moving memoir, Pentland reveals what it’s like to grow up as the daughter of a television star and how she navigated the turmoil, eventually finding her own path. Now happily married and raising five sons on a farm, Pentland has worked tirelessly to create the stable family she never had, while coming to terms at last with her deep-seated anxiety.�� This Will Be Funny Later is a darkly funny and frank chronicle of transition, from childhood to adulthood and motherhood—one woman’s journey to define herself and create the life she always wanted.��]]> 352 Jenny Pentland 0062962922 Nell 0 3.71
author: Jenny Pentland
name: Nell
average rating: 3.71
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]]> 200893734
In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.

Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother’s last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric,��Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.]]> 272 Erica McKeen 1324073810 Nell 0 3.29
author: Erica McKeen
name: Nell
average rating: 3.29
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rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/28
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]]> 16718093
"Conversational Capacity" provides the communication tools you need to ensure that your team remains on track even when dealing with its most troublesome issues, that it responds to tough challenges with agility and skill, and performs brilliantly in circumstances that would incapacitate less disciplined teams.

Praise for "Conversational Capacity"

""This book blows the lid off everything you have learned about team building and will have you asking, 'Why didn't someone show me this before?'"" -- Rick Woodcock, Chief Technology Officer of the US Naval Institute, Annapolis

""Easy to implement, Craig Weber's techniques will transform your organization. We put these principles into practice and saw immediate results."" -- Scott Goodey, CEO, Greenpoint Technologies

""A must-read for leaders and those who aspire to lead. It's one of the most influential books on the value of teaming."" -- Benjamin Ola Akande, PhD, Professor of Economics and Dean of the George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology, Webster University]]> 242 Craig Weber 0071807136 Nell 0 3.85 2013
author: Craig Weber
name: Nell
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Nell 0 4.09 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Nell
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/02
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]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Nell 0 3.57 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Nell
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> 176443453
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Māori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.

Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.

Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings�� misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.]]> 352 Rebecca K. Reilly 1668028042 Nell 0 3.90 2021
author: Rebecca K. Reilly
name: Nell
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> 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 Nell 0 3.83 2024
author: Andrew Boryga
name: Nell
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

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

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

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Nell 0 3.85 2023
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Nell
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture�� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 Nell 0 3.74 2022
author: Celeste Ng
name: Nell
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 50892360 The first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.]]> 454 Rebecca Roanhorse 1534437673 Nell 0 4.17 2020
author: Rebecca Roanhorse
name: Nell
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
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]]> 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Nell 0 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Nell
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/25
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]]> 27213168
Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. Those in cows and termites digest the plants they eat. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squids with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people.

I Contain Multitudes is the story of these extraordinary partnerships, between the creatures we are familiar with and those we are not. It reveals how we humans are disrupting these partnerships and how we might manipulate them for our own good. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.]]> 368 Ed Yong 0062368591 Nell 0 4.16 2016
author: Ed Yong
name: Nell
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
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]]> 199459845 Meet the Milanis: fast-food heiresses, L.A. royalty, and your newest reality TV obsession.

Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all—a McMansion in the hills of Los Angeles, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. There’s Violet, the big-hearted aspiring model; Roxanna, the chaotic influencer; Mina, the chronically online overachiever; and impressionable health fanatic Haylee. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realize their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll. Each of the Milanis—even their aloof Persian cat Pari—has something to hide, but the looming scrutiny of fame also threatens to bring the family closer than ever. Dramatic and biting yet full of heart, Tehrangeles is a tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one’s true self.]]> 320 Porochista Khakpour 1524747904 Nell 0 2.87 2024
author: Porochista Khakpour
name: Nell
average rating: 2.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Nell 0 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Nell
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Nell 0 4.06 2023
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Nell
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
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]]> 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Nell 0 3.71 2021
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Nell
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> 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 Nell 0 3.58 2024
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Nell
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
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]]> 79550
Full of brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own experience and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of the novels she wrote for adults. This new edition sees the return of a European literary gem—fresh, authentic and deeply humane.]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0954221710 Nell 0 4.05 1972
author: Tove Jansson
name: Nell
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan �� today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma �� who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods �� the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Nell 0 3.76 2022
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Nell
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
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]]> 57693566 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings--Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally--feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer�� play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.]]> 439 Jean Hanff Korelitz 1250790794 Nell 0 3.93 2022
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Nell
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
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]]> 127305658 A searing debut about the complexities of gender, power, and fame, told through the story of a young woman’s destructive relationship with a legendary writer.

It’s 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner, Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. More than anything else, she loves this new life for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez.

When a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault, and the reporter is looking for corroboration.

As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life?

Told in a dual narrative alternating between her present day and a letter from Tatum to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and power dynamics.]]> 304 Ursula Villarreal-Moura 1250882834 Nell 0 3.77 2024
author: Ursula Villarreal-Moura
name: Nell
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
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]]> 61102596 The story of three women who work in the homes of Singapore’s elite and band together to solve a murder mystery involving one of their own

The wealthy island nation of Singapore seems like an oasis of luxury and order, but it owes everything to the immigrant women no one sees. Corazon, Donita, and Angel are Filipina domestic workers—part of the wave of women sent to Singapore to be cleaners, maids, and caregivers in its decadent homes.

A veteran domestic worker, Corazon had retired back to the Philippines for good, but she has returned to Singapore under mysterious circumstances. Now she’s keeping a secret from her wealthy employer, who is planning an extravagant wedding for her socialite daughter.

Barely out of her teens, this is Donita’s first time in Singapore, and she’s had the bad luck to be hired by the notoriously fussy Mrs. Fann. Brazen and exuberant, Donita’s thrown herself into a love affair with an Indian construction worker and started a lively social media account that says more than it should.

Working as an in-home caregiver for an elderly employer, Angel is feeling blue after a recent breakup with the woman she loves. She’s alarmed when her employer’s son suddenly brings in a new Filipina nurse who may be a valuable ally, or who may be meant to replace her.

Then an explosive news story shatters Singapore’s famous tranquility—and sends a chill down the spine of every domestic worker: Flordeliza Martinez, a Filipina maid, has been arrested for murdering her female employer. The three women don’t know the accused well, but she could be any of them; every worker knows stories of women who were scapegoated or even executed for crimes they didn’t commit.

Shocked into action, Donita, Corazon, and Angel will use their considerable moxie and insight to piece together the mystery of what really happened on the day Flordeliza’s employer was murdered. After all, no one knows the secrets of Singapore’s elite like the women who work in their homes.]]> 320 Balli Kaur Jaswal 0063161605 Nell 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Balli Kaur Jaswal
name: Nell
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Nell 0 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Nell
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 157981682 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Nell 0 3.45 2024
author: Kelly Link
name: Nell
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 122349788 —Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of��Raising Good Humans

Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.

When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop . But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences�� teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.

Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.

Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves��and treat others with profound respect.

Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.


��"The compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies." —Publisher's Weekly]]> 272 Jen Lumanlan MS M.Ed. 1632174480 Nell 0 currently-reading 4.11
author: Jen Lumanlan MS M.Ed.
name: Nell
average rating: 4.11
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date added: 2024/05/23
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]]> 44436221 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration��Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 288 Charles Yu Nell 0 3.95 2020
author: Charles Yu
name: Nell
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/09
date added: 2024/04/09
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]]> 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Nell 0 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Nell
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> 22929586 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.]]> 406 Lucia Berlin 0374202397 Nell 0 4.23 2015
author: Lucia Berlin
name: Nell
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/03/31
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]]> 8050514 Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. The dog doesn’t respond to its owner based on what the owner thinks, says, or does; it responds to what the owner feels. And in this way, dogs can actually put people back in touch with their own emotions.

Behan was originally trained under the dominance theory by his father, John Behan, one of the first in America to make dog training a career. But he eventually came to believe that what made the modern dog trainable was not the dominance hierarchy but the dog’s ability to work as a cooperative group member in the hunt. This ability then evolved into an emotional capacity that perfectly complements human emotion.

Behan demonstrates that dogs and humans are connected more profoundly than has ever been imagined �� by heart �� and that this approach to dog cognition can help us understand many of dogs�� most inscrutable behaviors. This groundbreaking, provocative book opens the door to a whole new understanding between species, and perhaps a whole new understanding of ourselves.]]> 344 Kevin Behan 1577316967 Nell 0 currently-reading 3.09 2011
author: Kevin Behan
name: Nell
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/23
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]]> 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 Nell 0 3.47 2021
author: Rachel Yoder
name: Nell
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
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]]> 61272707 A true story about the ways loss can transform us into the people we want to become.
“What Looks Like Bravery is a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book. I'm in tears with the happy-sad truth and beauty of it. Laurel is a magnificent writer.�� —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild
Laurel Braitman spent her childhood learning from her dad how to out-fish grown men, keep bees, and fix carburetors. Diagnosed young with terminal cancer, he raced against the clock to leave her the skills she’d need to survive without him. This was one legacy. Another was relentless perfectionism and the belief that bravery meant never acknowledging your own fear.
By her mid-thirties Laurel is a ship about to splinter on the rocks, having learned the hard way that no achievement can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with. So, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones—Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, her Tinder App. She finds help from a wise birder in the Bering Sea, a few dozen grieving kids, and a succession of smart teachers who convince her that you cannot be brave if you’re not scared. Along the way, she faces a wildfire that threatens everyone and everything she cares about and is forced by life to say another wrenching goodbye long before she wants to. This time she may not be ready, but she’s prepared. Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them.]]> 288 Laurel Braitman 1501158503 Nell 0 4.41
author: Laurel Braitman
name: Nell
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/19
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]]> 62919742 Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

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

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

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.']]> 352 Safiya Sinclair 1982132337 Nell 0 4.44 2023
author: Safiya Sinclair
name: Nell
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Nell 0 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Nell
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/24
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]]> 52761023 Washington Black; My Sister, The Serial Killer; and Her Body and Other Parties.

As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.]]> 384 Susan Abulhawa 1982137037 Nell 0 4.52 2019
author: Susan Abulhawa
name: Nell
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
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]]> 1088295 94 Paolo Soleri 0932238270 Nell 0 3.69 1984
author: Paolo Soleri
name: Nell
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/02
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]]> 62919375
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds.]]> 416 Emily Habeck 1668006499 Nell 0 3.96 2023
author: Emily Habeck
name: Nell
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
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]]> 59793324 Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material��, Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze�� is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City�� explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling�� closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.]]> 256 Sayaka Murata 0802159583 Nell 0 3.76 2019
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Nell
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/17
date added: 2023/12/17
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]]> 61089492
Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.]]> 224 Paul Harding 132403629X Nell 0 3.73 2023
author: Paul Harding
name: Nell
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 60149532 Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.]]> 368 Deanna Raybourn 0593200683 Nell 0 3.82 2022
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Nell
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/03
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]]> 58214328 A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.

"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.]]> 352 Stephanie Foo 0593238109 Nell 0 4.50 2022
author: Stephanie Foo
name: Nell
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 28815371
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.]]> 288 Brit Bennett 0399184511 Nell 0 3.88 2016
author: Brit Bennett
name: Nell
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 58978299
Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.

The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR, Harper's Bazaar, Chicago Tribune, Vulture, Oprah Daily, CrimeReads, The Millions, and many more!

An Edgar Award Finalist �� A Bram Stoker Award Winner �� A Shirley Jackson Award Winner �� A Book of the Month Club Pick �� An August Indie Next List Selection �� An ABA Indie Bestseller]]> 320 Gabino Iglesias 0316426911 Nell 0 3.65 2022
author: Gabino Iglesias
name: Nell
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/05
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]]> 50755102 “One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction�� (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous twenty-first century.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.]]> 272 Olivia Laing 132400570X Nell 0 4.02 2020
author: Olivia Laing
name: Nell
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/11
date added: 2023/10/11
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]]> 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.�� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Nell 0 3.34 2023
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Nell
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/01
date added: 2023/10/01
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]]> 22642472 A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire, and a crime committed long ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite.

In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.]]> 273 Margaret Atwood 0385539126 Nell 0 3.89 2014
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Nell
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/15
date added: 2023/09/15
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]]> 49504061
But when the Eastwood sisters--James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna--join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote-and perhaps not even to live-the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There's no such thing as witches. But there will be.]]> 517 Alix E. Harrow 0316422045 Nell 0 currently-reading 4.01 2020
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Nell
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 61246258
Shot through with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is an addictive, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, lovable—if fallible—characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class.]]> 304 Jenny Jackson 059349069X Nell 0 3.49 2023
author: Jenny Jackson
name: Nell
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/04
date added: 2023/09/04
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]]> 59576064
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489128 Nell 0 3.83 2022
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Nell
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
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]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Nell 0 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Nell
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/28
date added: 2023/07/28
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]]> 36408711
See also Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program, by Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff, a thorough overview of conducting MSC (for professionals), and The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, by Christopher Germer, which delves into mindful self-compassion and shares moving stories of how it can change lives.]]> 206 Kristin Neff 1462526780 Nell 0 4.50 2018
author: Kristin Neff
name: Nell
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/05/20
date added: 2023/07/28
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]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk Nell 0 3.93 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Nell
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/15
date added: 2023/07/15
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]]> 24724 497 T. Coraghessan Boyle 0142003808 Nell 0 3.82 2003
author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
name: Nell
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/14
date added: 2023/07/14
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]]> 36203362 How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”��Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.]]> 304 Sheila Heti 1627790772 Nell 0 3.66 2018
author: Sheila Heti
name: Nell
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/07/02
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]]> 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Nell 0 3.87 2012
author: Maria Semple
name: Nell
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/19
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> 58393129 Memoir meets craft masterclass in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful�� exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiences—“a must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr).

In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the questions which run through it.

How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw��? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong?

Drawing on her own path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and Harvard night school—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see themselves in a story.]]> 171 Melissa Febos 1646220854 Nell 0 4.23 2022
author: Melissa Febos
name: Nell
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/19
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> 43412920
A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It’s also very, very funny.]]> 1022 Lucy Ellmann 191029697X Nell 0 3.90 2019
author: Lucy Ellmann
name: Nell
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/29
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]]> 56978048 The beloved author of bestsellers��Women Talking,��A Complicated Kindness, ���Ի���All My Puny Sorrows��returns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to perseverance and love in an unusual family.
��
Fight Night��is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You’re a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "and you must learn to fight."

As Swiv records her thoughts and observations,��Fight Night��unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously—to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.]]> 255 Miriam Toews 1635578175 Nell 0 4.02 2021
author: Miriam Toews
name: Nell
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/25
date added: 2023/05/25
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]]> 18803640
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

Destined to be a classic of nature writing, "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for "The Once and Future King." It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.]]> 300 Helen Macdonald 0224097008 Nell 0 3.73 2014
author: Helen Macdonald
name: Nell
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/13
date added: 2023/04/13
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]]> 86655
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.]]> 240 Jennifer Egan 1400043921 Nell 0 3.47 2006
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Nell
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/27
date added: 2023/03/27
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]]> 30038917
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.]]> 308 Melissa Febos 1632866579 Nell 0 4.20 2017
author: Melissa Febos
name: Nell
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 143889 The End of Vandalism, was serialized in The New Yorker, was compared to the work of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner by USA Today, and was named a Best Book of the Year in multiple publications. Now, appearing simultaneously with his first new novel in six years, Drury's debut is back in print.

Welcome to Grouse County �� a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric �� where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars. At the heart of The End of Vandalism is an unforgettable love triangle set off by a crime: Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an anti–vandalism dance and then marries the culprit's ex-wife Louise. So Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self, and the three find themselves on an epic journey.

At turns hilarious and heart-breaking, The End of Vandalism is a radiant novel about the beauty and ache of modern life.
]]> 352 Tom Drury 0802142702 Nell 5 3.95 1994
author: Tom Drury
name: Nell
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/19
date added: 2023/02/19
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]]> 59808605 Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel―until it no longer does.

Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.]]> 288 Rachel Aviv 0374600848 Nell 0 4.10 2022
author: Rachel Aviv
name: Nell
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/21
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]]> 11866694
Arcadia follows this lyrical, rollicking, tragic, and exquisite utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday and after. The story is told from the point of view of Bit, a fascinating character and the first child born in Arcadia.]]> 291 Lauren Groff 1401340873 Nell 0 3.69 2012
author: Lauren Groff
name: Nell
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2023/01/05
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]]> 58527285 Twelve eye-opening, mind-expanding, funny and provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence for the way we live and the way we love from New York Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson

"Talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy," said Dwight Garner in the New York Times about Jeanette Winterson's latest novel, Frankissstein, which perfectly describes too this new collection of essays on the same subject of AI.

In 12 Bytes, the New York Times bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson, draws on her years of thinking and reading about artificial intelligence in all its bewildering manifestations. In her brilliant, laser focused, uniquely pointed and witty style of story-telling, Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, the politics of race and gender, and computer science, to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.

When we create non-biological life-forms, will we do so in our image? Or will we accept the once-in-a-species opportunity to remake ourselves in their image? What do love, caring, sex, and attachment look like when humans form connections with non-human helpers, teachers, sex-workers, and companions? And what will happen to our deep-rooted assumptions about gender? Will the physical body that is our home soon be enhanced by biological and neural implants, keeping us fitter, younger, and connected? Is it time to join Elon Musk and leave Planet Earth?

With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most fascinating talking points, from the algorithms that data-dossier your whole life to the weirdness of backing up your brain.]]> 324 Jeanette Winterson 0802159257 Nell 0 3.87 2021
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Nell
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/04
date added: 2022/12/04
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]]> 59571658 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,�� writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.�� What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols��?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others�� stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,�� writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”]]> 100 Ada Limon 1639550496 Nell 0 4.34 2022
author: Ada Limon
name: Nell
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 10847
A multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.]]> 400 Jon Krakauer 0330419129 Nell 0 4.01 2003
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Nell
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/23
date added: 2022/10/23
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]]> 55563 The Journalist And The Murderer, Janet Malcolm examines the psychopathology of journalism. She delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject.]]> 163 Janet Malcolm 1862076375 Nell 0 3.78 1990
author: Janet Malcolm
name: Nell
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/15
date added: 2022/10/15
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]]> 54321728
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes. She rents an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.

What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas Nell 0 3.65 2021
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Nell
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/12
date added: 2022/09/12
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]]> 153425 Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.

Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.]]> 192 Clarice Lispector 0811211401 Nell 0 currently-reading 4.08 1943
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Nell
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/11
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 101453 224 Maggie Nelson 1932360719 Nell 0 4.32 2005
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Nell
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/11
date added: 2022/09/11
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]]> 29936927 The Best We Could Do, the debut graphic novel memoir by Thi Bui, is an intimate look at one family's journey from their war-torn home in Vietnam to their new lives in America. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent �� the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through.

With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. The Best We Could Do brings to life her journey of understanding and provides inspiration to all who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.]]> 329 Thi Bui 1419718770 Nell 0 4.35 2017
author: Thi Bui
name: Nell
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/02
date added: 2022/09/02
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]]> 24728470 M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.]]> 256 Patti Smith 1101875100 Nell 0 4.00 2015
author: Patti Smith
name: Nell
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2022/08/19
date added: 2022/08/19
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]]> 57693171
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.]]> 369 Xóchitl González 1250786177 Nell 0 3.95 2022
author: Xóchitl González
name: Nell
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/08/07
date added: 2022/08/07
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]]> 25776682
Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard’s elegance of mind.]]> 304 Annie Dillard 0062433016 Nell 0 4.06 2016
author: Annie Dillard
name: Nell
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/31
date added: 2022/07/31
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]]> 57108050 The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism


In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy.

Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain.

Simpson’s book As We Have Always Done argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush��) enacts these ideas. The novel’s characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits—and the daily work of healing.]]> 390 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 1452965633 Nell 0 4.44 2020
author: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
name: Nell
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/28
date added: 2022/07/28
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]]> 51733706 Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space�� app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humor, and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.]]> 272 Anthony Veasna So 0063049910 Nell 0 3.94 2021
author: Anthony Veasna So
name: Nell
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/23
date added: 2022/07/23
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]]> 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Nell 0 3.92 2021
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Nell
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/13
date added: 2022/07/13
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wild to conceive of writing such a contemporary novel in which you, the author, play role as yourself! wilder still for it to be so compelling. as someone who spent much of the early years of the pan/endemic within hospital confines, this really cracked me open.
]]> 6798263 Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.]]> 112 Maggie Nelson 1933517409 Nell 0 4.09 2009
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Nell
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2022/06/28
date added: 2022/06/28
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]]> 55577549
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band �� and meeting the man who would become her husband �� her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner Nell 0 4.23 2021
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Nell
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/06/09
date added: 2022/06/09
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]]> 41720339 A revolutionary story of empowerment and redemption, Like a Bird is the highly anticipated debut novel from Fariha Roisin, author of the poetry collection How to Cure A Ghost
One of Vogue 's Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

Taylia Chatterjee has never known love, and certainly has never felt it for herself. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with her older sister Alyssa, their parents were both overbearing and emotionally distant, and despite idyllic summers in the Catskills, and gatherings with glamorous family friends, there is a sadness that emanates from the Chatterjee residence, a deep well of sorrow stemming from the racism of American society.

After a violent sexual assault, Taylia is disowned by her parents and suddenly forced to move out. As Taylia looks to the city, the ghost of her Indian grandmother dadi-ma is always one step ahead, while another more troubling ghost chases after her. Determined to have the courage to confront the pain that her family can't face, Taylia finds work at a neighborhood cafe owned by single mother and spiritualist, Kat. Taylia quickly builds a constellation of friends and lovers on her own,daring herself to be open to new experiences, even as they call into question what she thought she knew about the past.

Taylia's story is about survival, coming to terms with her past and looking forward to a future she never felt she was allowed to claim. Writing this for eighteen years, poet and activist Fariha Roisin's debut novel is an intense, provocative, and emotionally profound portrait of an inner life in turmoil and the redemptive power of community and love.]]> 300 Fariha Róisín Nell 0 3.59 2020
author: Fariha Róisín
name: Nell
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/06/06
date added: 2022/06/06
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]]> 17961 Alternate cover edition of ISBN-13: 978-0140286809, ISBN-10/ASIN: 0140286802

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century�� collected in a single volume

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper

For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.

Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.]]> 565 Jorge Luis Borges Nell 0 4.57 1998
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Nell
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/25
date added: 2022/05/25
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]]> 56557019
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this understudied aspect of Orwell's life journeys though his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.]]> 320 Rebecca Solnit Nell 0 4.18 2021
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Nell
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/24
date added: 2022/05/24
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]]> 17290919 How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of his essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in Mississippi. In this collection, Laymon deals in depth with his own personal story, which is filled with trials and reflections that illuminate under-appreciated aspects of contemporary American life. New and unexpected in contemporary American writing, Laymon’s voice mixes the colloquial with the acerbic, while sharp insights and blast-furnace heat calls to mind a black 21st-century Mark Twain. Much like Twain, Laymon's writing is steeped in controversial issues both private and public. This collection introduces Laymon as a writer who balances volatile concepts on a razor's edge and chops up much-discussed and often-misunderstood topics with his scathing humor and fresh, unexpected takes on the ongoing absurdities, frivolities, and calamities of American life.]]> 146 Kiese Laymon 1932841776 Nell 0 4.30 2013
author: Kiese Laymon
name: Nell
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/09
date added: 2022/05/09
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]]> 540489 240 Monica Furlong 0394825985 Nell 0 4.20 1987
author: Monica Furlong
name: Nell
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/29
date added: 2022/04/29
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]]> 57004637 A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.

And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.]]> 548 Ruth Ozeki 0399563644 Nell 0 4.01 2021
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Nell
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/28
date added: 2022/04/28
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]]> 34898 96 Ruth Stiles Gannett 0440421217 Nell 0 4.09 1948
author: Ruth Stiles Gannett
name: Nell
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/22
date added: 2022/04/22
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]]> 57427350 By National Book Award and the National Book Critics�� Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman’s journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.

Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.]]> 354 Rabih Alameddine 0802157807 Nell 5 4.02 2021
author: Rabih Alameddine
name: Nell
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/18
date added: 2022/04/18
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]]> 52392401 As featured in the Ram Dass documentary film Becoming Nobody, five essential live teaching sessions on audio, presented here in their entirety

The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody. —Ram Dass

If you’re a spiritual explorer of any age or tradition, chances are you’ve heard of Ram Dass. This singular luminary began his “somebody training�� as Richard Alpert—the 1960’s Harvard-psychologist-turned-hippie who tripped with Timothy Leary, befriended beat poets and Tibetan lamas, found his lifelong guru in India, and wrote the perennial classic Be Here Now.

That’s the “somebody�� part of his story. But for those who’ve experienced Ram Dass live as he shares his insights and personal journey on the way to becoming nobody—he has been for many the spark that ignited them to the liberating truth of who we really are.

This audio collection brings us five essential sessions, featured in the Ram Dass documentary film Becoming Nobody, presented here in their entirety. Each beautifully illuminates a core dimension of Ram Dass’s wisdom. Through teaching stories, true accounts, eye-opening revelations, and his one-of-a-kind sense of humor, this legendary teacher helps show us the way out of the prison of our self-identity—and into the joy of being at once “nobody�� and the universal divine at play in the world.]]> 0 Ram Dass 1683646266 Nell 0 ramdass+ ebwhite= pb&j 4.48
author: Ram Dass
name: Nell
average rating: 4.48
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/04
date added: 2022/04/04
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ramdass+ ebwhite= pb&j
]]> 394616 384 E.B. White 0060932236 Nell 0 4.31 1936
author: E.B. White
name: Nell
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/04
date added: 2022/04/04
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]]> 57693663
Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house--what the locals call "The Devil House"--in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.]]> 403 John Darnielle 0374212236 Nell 0 3.21 2022
author: John Darnielle
name: Nell
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/26
date added: 2022/03/26
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]]> 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Nell 0 4.24 2021
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Nell
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/24
date added: 2022/03/24
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kinda schlocky kinda beautiful tried too hard and did a lot
]]> 3636 208 Lois Lowry 0385732554 Nell 0 4.12 1993
author: Lois Lowry
name: Nell
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/19
date added: 2022/03/19
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]]> 41044096 Scott O'Dell's Newbery Medal-winning classic is a gripping tale of survival, strength, and courage. Based on the true story of a Nicole�o Indian girl living alone on an island off the coast of California, Island of the Blue Dolphins has captivated readers for generations.

On San Nicolas Island, dolphins flash in the surrounding blue waters, sea otter play in the vast kelp beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, a girl named Karana spent eighteen years alone.

Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that killed her younger brother, constantly guard against Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. Her courage, self-reliance, and grit has inspired millions of readers in this breathtaking adventure.

As Smithsonian magazine put "For kids all over the country, reading the book in language arts classes, Karana is a powerful symbol of their growing independence. Through her, they can imagine themselves making their way in the world alone--and thriving."]]> 194 Scott O'Dell 0547488890 Nell 0 4.02 1960
author: Scott O'Dell
name: Nell
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/13
date added: 2022/03/13
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]]> 5114
"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is a story about the Glass family, narrated by Buddy, the second oldest brother. Buddy is attending his brother Seymour's wedding to a gal named Muriel, but he's on Army leave during active duty in World War II. At the wedding, everyone is stunned when Seymour does not show up.

The action of the story picks up when several characters end up carpooling together following the failed wedding. The others (the Matron of Honor and her husband, and a couple of stragglers) are talking about Seymour and the disappointment of his not showing up, and Buddy never tells them that he is secretly Seymour's brother, so they talk more openly with him than they otherwise would.

They criticize Seymour and speculate about his character flaws and deficiencies, but Buddy finds their assessments quite judgmental and biased. He then decides to tell the car who he really is, shaming them for their loose criticisms.

He finds Seymour's journal, and he discovers a strange message from their sister Boo Boo for Seymour on their bathroom mirror: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom/ taller far than a tall man." This is a fragment from the Greek poet Sappho.

"Seymour: An Introduction" is a kind of elegy for Seymour from Buddy, told in the form of an introduction to the reader. The reader makes Seymour's acquaintance while knowing that Seymour technically isn't alive when the story is published, having killed himself in 1948.

This portion of the story is told in stream of consciousness, and it discusses Eastern religious mysticism.]]> 256 J.D. Salinger 0316766941 Nell 0 4.13 1955
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Nell
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2022/02/20
date added: 2022/02/20
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]]> 41880602
But Toby's new life �� liver specialist by day, kids every other weekend, rabid somewhat anonymous sex at night �� is interrupted when his ex-wife suddenly disappears. Either on a vision quest or a nervous breakdown, Toby doesn't know �� she won't answer his texts or calls.

Is Toby's ex just angry, like always? Is she punishing him, yet again, for not being the bread winner she was? As he desperately searches for her while juggling his job and parenting their two unraveling children, Toby is forced to reckon with the real reasons his marriage fell apart, and to ask if the story he has been telling himself all this time is true.]]> 373 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0525510877 Nell 0 3.61 2019
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Nell
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2022/02/10
date added: 2022/02/10
shelves:
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]]>