en-US Sun, 11 May 2025 04:09:05 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 52958127
But when the first club member turns up dead, the remaining amateur sleuths realise they will need all of their murder-mystery expertise to get off the island alive.

As the party are picked off one by one, the survivors grow desperate and paranoid, turning on each other. Will anyone be able to untangle the murderer’s fiendish plan before it’s too late?]]> 284 Yukito Ayatsuji 1782276343 Melanie 4 3.85 1987
author: Yukito Ayatsuji
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/10
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves: 2025, ebook, mystery-and-intrigue
review:

]]> 16129295
In a place like no other, on a mystical island in the shape of tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of oracles. Kamikuu is admired far and wide for her otherworldly beauty; small and headstrong Namima learns to live in her sister’s shadow. On her sixth birthday, Kamikuu is chosen to become the next Oracle, serving the realm of light, while Namima is forced to serve the realm of darkness—destined to spend eternity guiding the spirits of the deceased to the underworld.

As the sisters serve opposite fates, Namima embarks on a journey that takes her from the experience of first love to the aftermath of scalding betrayal. Caught in an elaborate web of treachery, she travels between the land of the living and the Realm of the Dead, seeking vengeance and closure.

At the heart of this exquisitely dark tale, Kirino masterfully reimagines the ancient Japanese creation myth of Izanami and Izanaki. A provocative, fantastical saga, The Goddess Chronicle tells a sumptuous story of sex, murder, gods and goddesses, and bittersweet revenge.]]> 320 Natsuo Kirino 0802121098 Melanie 0 to-read 3.75 2008
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 251348
What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.]]> 194 Ian Buruma 0812972864 Melanie 4 2025 3.67 2003
author: Ian Buruma
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/05
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 311135
It falls to the quietly resourceful Inspector Hannasyde to sift through all the secrets and lies and discover just who killed Gregory Matthews. He faces the deadliest test of his career when members of the wealthy Matthews clan begin to die, one by one. With motives everywhere, it is no easy case for the inspector to solve in time to spare the next victim. Meet the Matthews -- while they last... Gregory, Harriet, Gertrude, Zoe, Guy, Stella and Randall.]]> 352 Georgette Heyer 0099493640 Melanie 0 to-read 3.79 1936
author: Georgette Heyer
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 80616 The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.]]> 201 Dashiell Hammett 0679722637 Melanie 0 to-read 3.92 1934
author: Dashiell Hammett
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217387846 “Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, and wise� (Leni Zumas)-the story of a woman risking her life and finding her own way to protest the end of abortion rights.

A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a “heartbeat law� criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.

Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn't follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss's arrest and everything that's been lost. She'll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).

Angela's protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who's a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.

Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela's story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.]]> 224 Hilary Plum 1639735437 Melanie 0 to-read 4.15 2025
author: Hilary Plum
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58276619
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas -- and a new unrest -- begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.

In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.

The story of Frank -- a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day -- is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries -- those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is -- The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.]]> 965 Olga Tokarczuk Melanie 0 to-read 3.89 2014
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60410002 Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.'

So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash's world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi's care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.
]]> 224 Catherine Newman 0063230895 Melanie 0 to-read 3.95 2022
author: Catherine Newman
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60560037
In her first collection, she gives us nine beautifully crafted love stories. Girl meets boy camping outside a movie theater. Best friends debate the merits of high school dances. A prince romances a troll. A girl romances an imaginary boy. And Simon Snow himself returns for a holiday adventure.

It’s a feast of irresistible characters, hilarious dialogue, and masterful storytelling—in short, everything you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell book.]]> 282 Rainbow Rowell 1250855411 Melanie 0 to-read 3.94 2022
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62772
A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.]]> 470 Natsume SĹŤseki 080483265X Melanie 0 to-read 3.70 1906
author: Natsume SĹŤseki
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1906
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215749331 For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell’s Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers—as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics—the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying BookĚýcrafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing.

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
Ěý
On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Heather Christle’s mother revealed a shocking secret from her she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
Ěý
Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's "birthday hill" in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf—both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page—and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
Ěý
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.]]> 288 Heather Christle 1643755927 Melanie 0 to-read 4.18
author: Heather Christle
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59629744 A prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel about a woman in Japan who avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months and beyond, the lie that she's pregnant

When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace--a company that manufactures cardboard tubes--she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups--because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant.

Pregnant Ms. Shibata doesn't have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms. Shibata isn't forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms. Shibata rests, watches TV, takes long baths, and even joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. But pregnant Ms. Shibata also has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Helped along by towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app on which she can log every stage of her "pregnancy," she feels prepared to play the game for the long haul. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

A surreal and wryly humorous cultural critique, Diary of a Void is bound to become a landmark in feminist world literature.]]> 213 Emi Yagi 0143136879 Melanie 4 2025 3.51 2020
author: Emi Yagi
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/02
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 YĹŤko Ogawa 1101870605 Melanie 5 2025 3.72 1994
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 217311813 An unforgettable and heartwarming debut following a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: one of her students.

Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She's also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others� expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves under the increasing scrutiny of their community, both women—and those closest to them—will come to realize that sometimes there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you really are.

Detransition Baby meets Fleishman is in Trouble in this remarkable debut novel from an incisive contemporary voice. A story about the awkwardness of growing up and the greatest love story of all, that between us and our friends, Woodworking is a tonic for the moment and a celebration of womanhood in all its multifaceted joy.]]> 351 Emily St. James 163893147X Melanie 0 to-read 4.42 2025
author: Emily St. James
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220161398 The riveting hidden history of feminist trailblazer Claire McCardell—the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.

Claire McCardell forever changed American fashion. In fact, much of what we wear today can be traced back to ballet flats, mix-and-match separates, wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim in womenswear, and more. She was compared to Albert Einstein for the prophetic original creations that she made over her three-decade career. But most importantly, she designed clothes to support a woman’s independence. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look. She insisted on pockets, during a time when male designers didn’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because, as she said, a woman “may live alone and like it, but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.�

After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette that was championed by predominantly male designers. Leading the charge was Christian Dior, who favored tightly cinched waists and towering high heels. Dior claimed that he wanted to “save women from nature.� McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, “The Gal Who Defied Dior.� And yet it is Dior’s name that we remember today.

This book tells the forgotten story of Claire McCardell and offers an unprecedented look inside a savvy mind that was steadily building an empire at a time when women rarely made it to the upper echelons of business. She was one of the first American designers to have her name carried on the clothing that she designed. McCardell defied gender expectations not just in her professional life, but her personal life as well. She was raised to be a homemaker, yet she chose to remain single until nearly forty years old and didn’t have any children of her own.

As entertaining as it is enlightening, this book illuminates how Claire McCardell become a global sensation who imagined, and created, something that didn’t yet fully American sportswear. This book is, at its core, the story of our bodies and our rights to choose how we dress, which is a symbol of our right to choose how we live.]]> 336 Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson 1668045230 Melanie 0 to-read 4.14
author: Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60534011 Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar criminal past. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakaka Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakaka find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.

During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakaka are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.

Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, but virtually unheard-of—so far—in the United States and Anglophone world in general.]]> 960 Otohiko Kaga 1628974044 Melanie 0 to-read 4.19 1985
author: Otohiko Kaga
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53403035 104 Anna Haifisch 1911081071 Melanie 4 3.83 2017
author: Anna Haifisch
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: 2025, comics_and_graphic_novels
review:

]]> 220595449
When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies� side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> 496 Mona Awad 166805986X Melanie 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Mona Awad
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58470813
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.]]> 256 Yōko Tawada 0811229289 Melanie 0 to-read 3.28 2018
author: YĹŤko Tawada
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215750214 Ten beautifully illustrated essays tell the stories of handcrafted objects and their makers, providing inspiration and insight into Black history and craftsmanship.

Black artisans have long been central to American art and design, creating innovative and highly desired work against immense odds. Atlanta-based chairmaker and scholar Robell Awake explores the stories behind ten cornerstones of Black craft,


The celebrated wooden chairs of Richard Poynor, an enslaved craftsman who began a dynasty of Tennessee chairmakers.


The elegant wrought-iron gates of Philip Simmons, seen to this day throughout Charleston, South Carolina, whose work features motifs from the Low Country.


The inventive assemblage art and yard shows of Joe Minter, James Hampton, Bessie Harvey, and others, who draw on African spiritual traditions to create large-scale improvisational art installations.




From the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, to Ann Lowe, the couture dressmaker who made Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress, to Gullah Geechee sweetgrass basket makers, to the celebrated quilters of Gee's Bend, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects illuminates the work of generations of Black craftspeople, foregrounding their enduring contributions to American craft.

BLACK CRAFT AND Delving into the history of Black skilled artisans, estimated to have outnumbered white artisans five to one in the southern United States in the late 1800s, this unique art history book celebrates handcrafted objects that reflect the dynamic nature of Black culture.



DYNAMIC ILLUSTRATED Luminous color illustrations by artist Johnalynn Holland highlight beloved craft objects and their makers, creating a fascinating volume to study and treasure.



ART HISTORY Author Robell Awake is a notable furniture maker, artisan, and educator whose work has been featured in the New York Times and in group shows at Verso Gallery in New York City and the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Dr. Tiffany Momon, who contributes an afterword, is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive and a leading scholar of Black history and African American placemaking throughout the southeast.



BEAUTIFUL GIFT The gorgeous design is ideal for art collectorsĚýand craft enthusiasts, as a keepsake reminder of Black heritage, for Black History Month and beyond.

Perfect


Anyone interested in the intersection of Black art, craft, and history


Designers and craftspeople


Educators and students


Collectors and museum curators


Lovers of fine and artisanal design objects

]]> 144 Robell Awake 1797228544 Melanie 0 to-read 4.33
author: Robell Awake
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213570829
Suddenly the peaceful surface of life there is shattered as a poisonous letter is received by the town's most saintly citizen. It is followed by others; no one is safe from the anonymous letter writer. And the letters bring death. In the anguished days that follow, Joan realizes her own danger. For to receive on of these letters could mean the end of her love - and her life!]]> 352 Ethel Lina White 1464230498 Melanie 4 2025, mystery-and-intrigue 3.60 1932
author: Ethel Lina White
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: 2025, mystery-and-intrigue
review:

]]> 1555101 304 Maureen Duffy 0140162151 Melanie 0 to-read 3.48 1966
author: Maureen Duffy
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223338529 New York Times -bestselling author Daniel M. Lavery returns to the fabulous world of Women's Hotel in this delightful and heartwarming novella about one especially boisterous Christmastime at the beloved Biedermeier.

Christmas at the Biedermeier Hotel means employment, and employment means walking-around money. For ten months out of the year, jobs come fitfully and infrequently to Biedermeier residents, but between Advent and Epiphany any girl who wants something to do between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. has her pick of Holiday window dresser, salesgirl at the card stores on 42nd Street, Broadway usherette, assistant laundress at the Lincoln Center Nutcracker, Pinkerton security at the World’s Fair exhibition halls in Queens.

Katherine considers the possibility of making amends with her siblings in Ohio after a Gaudete Sunday service at Old First Presbyterian. Lucianne goes into business for herself at last, trying to run a telephone-order male escort agency (strictly above-board and Social Register only) out of her room, while Mrs. Mossler attempts to solve the mystery of the Biedermeier’s skyrocketing phone bill and frets over Christmas tips for the hotel’s few remaining employees.

And while the three thieves who stole twenty-four gems worth three million dollars from the American Museum of Natural History on October 29th have recently been caught, not all of the jewels have been recovered—and Patricia and Carol have behaved terribly strangely for the better part of a month. Christmas is a season of wonder and mystery, after all.]]> 144 Daniel M. Lavery 0063455013 Melanie 0 to-read 0.0
author: Daniel M. Lavery
name: Melanie
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 230910361
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.]]> 384 Thomas Pynchon 1594206104 Melanie 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Melanie
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29633913
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality� based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.]]> 280 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849352607 Melanie 4 4.27 2017
author: Adrienne Maree Brown
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: 2025, activism-and-social-justice
review:

]]> 222234426 Discover the slow, quiet joy of sewing clothes by hand in this one-of-kind guide.Ěý

Featuring step-by-step, illustrated instructions, this hand-sewing course-in-a-book shows you how to create nine wardrobe staples, including a t-shirt, button-up, and jeans, using simple hand-sewing and hand-stitching techniques.ĚýAuthor Louisa Owen Sonstroem shares her sustainable, empowering, and portable craft with gentle encouragement and guidance.ĚýSewists of all experience levels will learn how Ěý

Ěý Ěý·Draft a pattern to fit custom measurements.Ěý
Ěý Ěý·Select and cut fabric.
Ěý Ěý·Construct each garment without using a sewing machine.Ěý]]> Louisa Owen Sonstroem 1635866278 Melanie 0 to-read 4.30
author: Louisa Owen Sonstroem
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219301727 In this vibrant, gratifying novel, a pious, small-town teenager travels to Atlanta to get an abortion and finds herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black people.

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if the town midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia's celebrities whom Doris has seen in the pages of Jet and Ebony, political leaders like Coretta Scott King and Diane Nash, women who dance close together, atheists!ĚýAnd even more shocking? Mrs. Lucas seems right at home.

The young people Doris encounters are no less surprising. When he's not flirting too hard or talking too much, Sylvia’s nephew, Dexter, brings Doris into the heart of Atlanta’s civil rights movement, where some activists practice nonviolence to prepare for sit-ins, while others carry guns to protect Black families from the Klan.

From the guests at a queer kickback to the student activists at a SNCC conference, Doris suddenly finds herself surrounded by so many people who seem to know exactly who or what they want. Doris knows she doesn’t want a baby, but what does she want? Will this trip help her find out?

These Heathens! is a funny, poignant story about Black women’s obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.]]> 272 Mia McKenzie 0593596943 Melanie 0 to-read 4.64 2025
author: Mia McKenzie
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 212806663 “A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners�.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.]]> 240 Sarah Chihaya 059359472X Melanie 0 to-read 3.73 2025
author: Sarah Chihaya
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Melanie 5 2025, ebook, race-in-america 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: 2025, ebook, race-in-america
review:

]]> 61187307
Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.]]> 296 Kelly Hayes Melanie 0 to-read 4.57 2023
author: Kelly Hayes
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215493611 She’s a little edgy. He’s a lot of sunshine.

Love’s about to catch them completely off gourd�

Textile artist Sadie Fox didĚýnotĚýsign up for this. When she agreed to come home to Pea Blossom, Indiana, it was to care for her father’s beloved pumpkin patch. The deal was that—just for the summer—she would grow a ginormous pumpkin, win the Indiana State Fair's pumpkin contest and finally win back her father’s (grudging) respect.

Instead, a horde of wild hogs destroyedĚýthe. entire. patch. Which is precisely when the annoyingly sexy, sunshiny next-door neighbor shows up.

Josh Thatcher is a tech millionaire who traded in the office for growing gourds, including experimental squash hybrids. And for the life of her, Sadie can’t understand what he sees in her sweary, tattooed, prickly self—or why he’s offering to help his biggest competitor. But a storm-fueled kiss proves there’sĚýdefinitelyĚýsomething growing between them.

Maybe it’s just attraction. Maybe it’s more. Whatever it is, it’s already bigger than Sadie’s fast-growing pumpkin…or the secret that Josh has been hiding.

From showing up to glowing up, the characters in Afterglow Books are on the path to leading their best lives and finding sizzling romance along the way. Don’t miss any of these other fun titles�

A Tough Act to Fall For by Cynthia St. Aubin

Not So Fast by Karen Booth

Destination Weddings and Other Disasters by M.C. Vaughan]]> 288 Isabelle Popp 133550723X Melanie 5 2025
Let’s Give �em Pumpkin to Talk About- in addition to having an utterly perfect title - is funny, emotionally rich, and pumpkin-spicy. Sadie and Josh are grumpy and sunshine, respectively, but they come across as complex and real, more than an assortment of quirks and tropes. A central tension in their relationship - one of them is compelled to give to excess, while the other is unable to accept what is offered to them - feels authentic and unforced, and it’s so satisfying to watch them navigate this mismatch in ways that are sensitive and self-aware. (Emotional cluelessness is rarely a cute look.) I also love that Sadie is a fiber artist who is struggling with her art; this is woven (ha!) throughout the novel and has some really interesting resonances with her relationship(s) and emotional development.

I’m only an occasional romance reader, but I would absolutely read more romance novels like this one: with characters that are sharp, sweet, and believable; interpersonal dynamics that ring true; and sexy scenes with nary a hint of cringe! ]]> 3.98
author: Isabelle Popp
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: 2025
review:
I received an ARC from the author, who is both a dear friend and the wise person who introduced me to the concept of “volunteer squash.�

Let’s Give �em Pumpkin to Talk About- in addition to having an utterly perfect title - is funny, emotionally rich, and pumpkin-spicy. Sadie and Josh are grumpy and sunshine, respectively, but they come across as complex and real, more than an assortment of quirks and tropes. A central tension in their relationship - one of them is compelled to give to excess, while the other is unable to accept what is offered to them - feels authentic and unforced, and it’s so satisfying to watch them navigate this mismatch in ways that are sensitive and self-aware. (Emotional cluelessness is rarely a cute look.) I also love that Sadie is a fiber artist who is struggling with her art; this is woven (ha!) throughout the novel and has some really interesting resonances with her relationship(s) and emotional development.

I’m only an occasional romance reader, but I would absolutely read more romance novels like this one: with characters that are sharp, sweet, and believable; interpersonal dynamics that ring true; and sexy scenes with nary a hint of cringe!
]]> 31763731
“Audacious and surprising. . . . One of America’s most distinctive fictional voices.”—Boston Globe

When Klaus Shawano abducts Sweetheart Calico, the seductive Indian woman who has stolen his heart, and takes her far from her native Montana plains to his own Minneapolis home, he cannot begin to imagine the eventual ramifications his brazen act will entail. Shawano’s mysterious Antelope Woman has utterly mesmerized him—and soon proves to be a bewitching agent of chaos whose effect on others is disturbing and irresistible, as she alters the shape of things around her and the shape of things to come.

The Roy and Shawano families have been inextricably intertwined for generations and, unbeknownst to them, the mysterious Antelope Woman is a part of their fierce and haunting history. Antelope Woman ingeniously illuminates how that history affects the contemporary descendants of these families who are the products of two cultures, Ojibwe and white, which sit in uneasy relationship to one another.

In this remarkable novel, Erdrich weaves an unforgettable tapestry of ancestry, fate, harrowing tragedy, and redemption that is at once modern and eternal.

Ěý]]> 291 Louise Erdrich Melanie 5 2025, people_and_animals 3.85 1998
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: 2025, people_and_animals
review:

]]> 60418994 Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses.

In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.Ěý

Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what’s within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America’s existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here—and the apocalypse is a state of being.]]> 104 Saeed Jones Melanie 0 to-read 4.34 2022
author: Saeed Jones
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218460342 From the national best-selling author of Girlhood, an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances� from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.

By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that's as much about celibacy as its pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.]]> 288 Melissa Febos 0593537238 Melanie 5 4.45 2025
author: Melissa Febos
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: 2025, feminism, memoir, silence-exile-cunning, the-drinking-life
review:

]]> 60194743 An inspiring vision of how we can build a more just world--one small change at a time

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father's premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother's experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well.

Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities, and helping us build a more just and joyful world.]]> 392 Ruha Benjamin 0691222886 Melanie 0 to-read 4.45 2022
author: Ruha Benjamin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 150779002
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination.

The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”]]> 192 Ruha Benjamin 1324020970 Melanie 0 to-read 4.18
author: Ruha Benjamin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 53843459 Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision� and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.]]> 174 Alexis Pauline Gumbs 1849353972 Melanie 5 4.44 2020
author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: 2025, ebook, people_and_animals
review:

]]> 6496878 268 Stephen Mansfield 0195386337 Melanie 0 to-read 3.43
author: Stephen Mansfield
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.43
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34852583 Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design� that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.]]> 312 Arturo Escobar 0822370905 Melanie 0 to-read 4.26
author: Arturo Escobar
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62585994 224 Nicole Mirra 1324030216 Melanie 0 to-read 4.56
author: Nicole Mirra
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 40363215
When Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”—as Bookforum wrote—“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.�

“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.� ―Bookforum

“Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.� ―The Believer]]> 144 Danielle Dutton 1940696771 Melanie 0 to-read 4.24 2010
author: Danielle Dutton
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Melanie 0 to-read 4.58 2025
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 51288393 352 Mike Stout 1629638552 Melanie 0 to-read 3.77
author: Mike Stout
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 215362032 The kaleidoscopic follow-up to the bestselling Detransition, Baby

In this collection of one novel and three stories, Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex. In “The Chaser,� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 288 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Melanie 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Torrey Peters
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221928983 He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today � but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.

As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.]]> 224 Charlie Porter 0241721040 Melanie 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Charlie Porter
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216840844 “In these mysteries, the stakes are existential: knowing one’s self, knowing how to save the people you can save, and knowing that life is worth living even in the midst of pain. Gran is both blowing up the mystery genre and tying herself to its mast—what an incredible light show. Charming, gritty explorations of the greatest mysteries of all: Who are we, and what is this life?�
�Kirkus Reviews (Starred)


In her first collection of short stories, Sara Gran dives back into DeWitt’s mysterious universe and creates new worlds, drawing on memories of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Encyclopedia Brown, Two-Minute Mysteries, and teen sleuths.

Who destroyed Professor Wolf’s prize-winning tomatoes? What’s behind the mysterious goings-on at Killington Manor? And why does life sometimes feel like we’re stuck in a mystery, with few clues and no solutions? In her first collection of short stories, Sara Gran explores what detective stories mean and why we need them. If you love mysteries, and wonder why, this book is for you.

Featuring both new characters and characters from the beloved Claire DeWitt series.

“This playful story collection from Gran (the Claire DeWitt series) takes readers on a gleefully irreverent tour of classic crime tropes. . . . Gran’s characters always feel authentic, and the author infuses even her bleakest premises with a sly wit. This is an equally good bet for Gran’s longtime fans and newcomers to her work.�
�Publishers Weekly

“Sara Gran writes a kind of pop noir that's always about ten years ahead of its time, full of wisdom and life and perfect sentences that make other writers tear their hair out in jealousy. The stories in this book pack more punch than a lot of novels do, and will have you laughing and crying and thinking about the years that’ve slipped away all at once.�
—Ed Brubaker, author of Criminal, Reckless, Pulp, and Night Fever

“Gran has an arresting, original imagination. These stories are by turns profound, amusing, and just plain fun.� —Sara Paretsky

“A truly fun book of stories packed with clever twists and wry humor—not to mention the return of one of my favorite detectives, Claire DeWitt. Little Mysteries is big on smarts, suspense and style. You won't want to miss it.�
—Alison Gaylin, Edgar-winning author of We Are Watching

“Irresistible . . . the perfect introduction to one of my favorite writers.� —Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

“A darkly glittering cabinet of delights and curiosities by a master of the craft. Little Mysteries is a hell of a lot of fun.� —John Wray, author of Gone to the Wolves

“Sara Gran puts her detectives to work again on the deepest Mysteries. Thrillingly, without fear, they look beyond criminals and crimes, and into the motives of the Universe, of the Answer That Refuses to Appear, of love and of abandonment. Only Gran can take us this deep with this much pleasure in the reading, and so, Little Mysteries magnifies life itself.� —Conner Habib, author of Hawk Mountain]]> 280 Sara Gran Melanie 5 3.92 2025
author: Sara Gran
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: 2025, mystery-and-intrigue, short_stories
review:

]]> 205015171 The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart but as full-blooded people with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. It’s no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, so the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms’s newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda, while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “Nobody’s normal anymore,� as the bartender says, “not the old geezers and not the newborn kids.”]]> 224 Tove Jansson 1681378655 Melanie 4 2025 3.58 1974
author: Tove Jansson
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 207571168 A touchstone novel of lesbian adolescence, set years before gay liberation.“Dear Miss Maxfield â€� what I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you?—probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me …”First published in 1982 and set prior to Stonewall, Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a touchstone narrative of lesbian adolescence. Publishing Triangle called it one of the “best gay and lesbian novels of all time.”ĚýAfter sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter, they embark on one of the funniest—and saddest—love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Years before gay liberation, all Lynn knows about “lezbosâ€� is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass as “normal,â€� Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make homophobic jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, she checks the mirror for telltale signs of “perversionâ€� each night.ĚýProfound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall has been compared to The Catcher in the Rye and to Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. “The single most wonderful quality of this novel,â€� the Los Angeles Times Book Review writes, “is its absolute credibility.”]]> 312 Jane DeLynn 1635902215 Melanie 4 2025 4.00 1982
author: Jane DeLynn
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 221329939 460 Robert Ford Melanie 0 to-read 0.0
author: Robert Ford
name: Melanie
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195790833
Jamaica Kincaid’s first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book): , she gathers all that she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination.

Kincaid’s affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron �Jane Grant,� and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily and dreams of ways to trap small plant-eating animals. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up and where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and she considers the implications of the English idea of the garden in colonized countries. On a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show, she visits historic English gardens on English soil. My Garden (Book): is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardeners who tend them.]]> 240 Jamaica Kincaid 1250340632 Melanie 4 2025 3.83 1999
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 60207762
New York in the 1900s. A young girl fascinated by rare books defies all odds and becomes the director of one of the country’s most prestigious private libraries. It belongs to the magnate J.P. Morgan, darling of the international aristocracy and one of the city’s richest men.

Flamboyant, brilliant, beautiful, Belle is among New York society’s most sought after intellectuals. She also hides a secret. Although she looks white, she is African American, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as the consummate betrayal. Torn between history’s ineluctable imperatives and the freedom to belong to the society of her choosing, Belle’s drama, which plays out in a violently racist America, is one that resonates forcefully, and illuminatingly even today.

The fruit of years of research and interviews, Alexandra Lapierre’s magnificent novel recounts the struggles, victories, and heartbreaks of a woman who is free, astonishingly determined, daring, and fully, exuberantly alive.]]> 528 Alexandra Lapierre 1609457587 Melanie 0 to-read 4.21 2021
author: Alexandra Lapierre
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004055 A classic in the making: a mesmerizing novel about marriage and ambition, sexuality and secrecy, and the true costs of building an empire.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents' dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants-not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.

But Vivian's plans require capital, so the two pair up with Squire Clancey, scion of an old American fortune. Together they found Clancey & Schmidt, a preeminent manufacturer of soap, perfume, and candles. When Oscar and Squire fall in love, the trio form a new kind of partnership.

Vivian reaches the pinnacle of her power building Clancey & Schmidt into an empire of personal care products while operating behind the image of both men. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose.

For readers of Hernan Diaz's Trust and Colm TĂłibĂ­n's The Magician, with echoes of Gustave Flaubert and E.M. Forster, Mutual Interest is a beguiling story of queer romance, empire, and power.]]> 336 Olivia Wolfgang-Smith 1639733329 Melanie 0 to-read 3.61 2025
author: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217463459 �Beautifully written� LOUISE KENNEDY
�Full of verve and wit and humanity� MARY COSTELLO
�Clever and original� TLS
�A tremendous new talent� KEVIN BARRY

Mairéad works tirelessly in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department � mending shoes, fixing broken zips and even handwashing underwear. She must also sidestep groping hands backstage and withstand the relentless bullying of the show’s producer.

The job was meant to be the first step towards the life Mairéad has always wanted, and yet half of her remains back home in Ireland, along with everything she abandoned there.

A reckoning with the past is coming and, with it, the need to forge a new present � one stitch at a time.]]> 231 Elaine Garvey 1837260184 Melanie 0 to-read 3.46
author: Elaine Garvey
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.46
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213395487 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.

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

The various �-ists� who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.]]> 256 Lydia Millet 1324074418 Melanie 0 to-read 3.82
author: Lydia Millet
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62972502 In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivity.

The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante, and Kobo Abe, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and critic Mieko Kanai—whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan—is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.]]> 179 Mieko Kanai 081123228X Melanie 4 2025 3.62 1997
author: Mieko Kanai
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 122752298 Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.
In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work.]]> 104 Virginia Woolf 1959891316 Melanie 4 4.00 1921
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1921
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: 2025, short_stories, the-woolves
review:

]]> 213395442 A young woman’s seasonal job takes a dark, surreal turn in this vivid and surprising debut.

When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months� rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers� campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself.

As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.]]> 296 Margie Sarsfield 1324078731 Melanie 0 to-read 3.56 2025
author: Margie Sarsfield
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208155402 A moving portrayal of a troubled mother–daughter relationship, shortlisted for Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo’s nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door.

As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend � all under the bright lights of Tokyo�s �sleepless town�, Kabukichō.

In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author’s own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent.]]> 144 Suzumi Suzuki 1915590787 Melanie 0 to-read 3.30 2022
author: Suzumi Suzuki
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 3862389 The Ladies Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the rise of the modern department store in late nineteenth-century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family: it is emblematic of changes in consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century.

Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified.

This new translation of the eleventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola's greatest works.]]> 436 Émile Zola 0199536902 Melanie 5 2025 3.98 1883
author: Émile Zola
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1883
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 217503540
By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0679761799 Melanie 4 4.22 1965
author: James Baldwin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: 2025, race-in-america, short_stories
review:

]]> 4502985 Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France. James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.]]> 416 Magdalena J. Zaborowska Melanie 0 to-read 3.96 2008
author: Magdalena J. Zaborowska
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60557518
An accidental pregnancy, a good-looking man who cares about no one but himself, marriage because the man “had a bit of a Christian upbringing,� divorce—that is the trajectory of Pipina’s life, leading to single motherhood and a thousand cruelties of everyday life because she is an ugly woman in a world where ugliness is worse than a death sentence. At every turn, she is reminded of her inferiority. She can’t wait for the end of each day when she can sit in the stairwell outside of her dilapidated apartment and retreat into her thoughts. Her drab life full of indignities dissolves only in her beautiful, cinematic dreams. In them, she experiences whatever she can’t do or have in real life. She creates a rich inner world, and her razor-sharp observations, interlaced with a good dose of humor, produce a revealing narrative about contemporary society. In the first English translation of her work, the brilliant Slovak author Zuzana Cigánová pulls back the veil on people’s most private thoughts—thoughts that could very much be our own.]]> 168 Zuzana Cigánová 1803090820 Melanie 0 to-read 0.0
author: Zuzana Cigánová
name: Melanie
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207293782 Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?� —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock n� rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.]]> 352 Lili Anolik 1668065487 Melanie 4 2025, ladyfriends 3.21 2024
author: Lili Anolik
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: 2025, ladyfriends
review:

]]> 33871745 Territory of Light is the luminous story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her three-year-old daughter. Its twelve, stand-alone fragments follow the first year of her separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming through windows, dappled light in the park, distant fireworks, dazzling floodwater, desaturated streetlamps and earth-shaking explosions. The seemingly artless prose is beautifully patterned: the cumulative effect is disarmingly powerful and images remain seared into your retina for a long time afterwards.]]> 122 YĹ«ko Tsushima 0241312191 Melanie 0 to-read 3.61 1978
author: YĹ«ko Tsushima
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35011998 Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,� M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.]]> 248 Alexis Pauline Gumbs 0822370840 Melanie 0 to-read 4.48 2018
author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 125819274
Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigateĚýthe labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for—or neglect—one another.

With each story exemplifying Stevens's ability to examine the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective, Ghost Pains Ěýis a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.]]> 304 Jessi Jezewska Stevens Melanie 0 to-read 3.70 2024
author: Jessi Jezewska Stevens
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28818718
A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

I was reading a line in a book, then reading a line in another book, and performing small acts in between: I sat at intervals on the toilet, I slept sporadically, I ate kale and "fish food," and called myself "Renee" for a time. Nobody knew who I was at the grocery store, but going there was my big event. I knew the books of these people; I knew these people and I didn't change their names, but when they appeared in my books it wasn't really their stories I was telling, so they didn't need my protection and I could go "Danielle, Danielle" all day.

Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. In addition to Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), she is the author of eight works of prose, including the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), as well as a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her most recent work of fiction Morelia is forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 fellowship from The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2016 grant to artists from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in New England with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.
]]> 144 Renee Gladman 1940696275 Melanie 0 to-read 4.06 2016
author: Renee Gladman
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205673380 Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing

In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.Ěý

In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?

Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.]]> 192 Sofia Samatar 1593767668 Melanie 0 to-read 4.27
author: Sofia Samatar
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62952133
From “one of our most formally ambitious writers� ( Esquire ), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss

In The Light Room , Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, YĹ«ko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.

How will our memories, and our children’s, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room , Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.]]> 256 Kate Zambreno 059342106X Melanie 4 2025 3.56 2023
author: Kate Zambreno
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 220237601 The gripping courtroom drama of a Brooklyn-born Englishman who became the voice of Nazi Germany, by “one of the most brilliant and erudite journalists of the century� (The New York Times).


In 1945, The New Yorker commissioned star reporter Rebecca West to cover the London trial of William Joyce, who stood accused by the British government of aiding the Third Reich. Captured by British forces in Germany, Joyce was alleged to have hosted a radio program, Germany Calling, devoted to Nazi propaganda and calls for a British surrender.


The legal case against Joyce (known as “Lord Haw-Haw� for his supposedly posh accent) proved to be tenuous and full of uncertainties. Yet each new piece of evidence added to West’s timeless portrait of a social reject who turned to the far right, who rose through the ranks without ever being liked, and who sought validation through a set of shared hatreds—of elites, of communists, and especially of Jews.


As a work of psychological suspense, Rebecca West’s Radio Treason anticipates Truman Capote, Janet Malcolm, and Joan Didion at their best. As a study in political extremism, as Katie Roiphe writes in her foreword, “It is as if Lord Haw-Haw has been transported from her time into ours.”]]> 192 Rebecca West 1946022802 Melanie 0 to-read 3.50 1949
author: Rebecca West
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213619983 With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.Ěý

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1646222873 Melanie 0 to-read 3.62 2024
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32334871
Waiting? Listening? Guiding. No. Signalling.

Controversial when first published in the early days of World War II, due to its treatment of a loathsome upper-crust family dodging wartime responsibility, A Footman for the Peacock can now be enjoyed as a scathing satire of class abuses, a comic masterpiece falling somewhere between Barbara Pym and Monty Python.

Sir Edmund and Lady Evelyn Roundelay live surrounded by a menagerie of relations and retainers. The Roundelays� history of callous cruelty is literally etched on a window of the servants� quarters with the words “Heryn I dye, Thomas Picocke. 1792�. Sir Edmund reflects cheerfully on the running footmen who have �died off like flies� in the family’s service.

But now—amidst digressions on everything from family history and servant woes to the villagers� linguistic peculiarities and a song immortalizing the footman’s plight—war threatens the Roundelays� smug superiority. What’s more, it appears that the estate’s peacock is a reincarnation of Thomas Picocke, and may be aiding the Nazi cause � By turns giddy and incisive, hilarious and heartbreaking, A Footman for the Peacock is Rachel Ferguson at her very best. This new edition features an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.

�The Roundelays are people to live with and laugh at and love� Punch]]> 221 Rachel Ferguson Melanie 4 2025 3.42 1940
author: Rachel Ferguson
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1940
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> 216970872 The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.

"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."

Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.Ěý

By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory toĚýshow how crucial this processĚý can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.]]> 224 Lidia Yuknavitch 0593713052 Melanie 0 to-read 4.36 2025
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53114460
A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare.]]> 304 Lidia Yuknavitch 1786893304 Melanie 0 to-read 3.95 2011
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Melanie 0 to-read 4.33 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 182484370
Sera Swan was once one of the most powerful witches in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her magic, befriended a semi-villainous talking fox, and was exiled from her magical Guild. Now she ( slightly reluctantly and just a bit grumpily) helps Aunt Jasmine run an inn in Lancashire, where she deals with her quirky guests' shenanigans, tries to keep the talking fox in check, and longs for the magical future she lost.

When she learns about an old spellbook that holds the secret to restoring her power, she turns to Luke Larsen, a gorgeous historian who might just be able to help her unlock the book’s mysteries. Luke, who has his own reasons for staying at the inn, never planned on getting involved in the madcap goings-on around him and certainly had no intention of letting certain grumpy innkeepers past his icy walls, so no one is more surprised than he is when he not only agrees to help, but also finds himself thawing .

Running an inn, reclaiming lost magic, and staying one step ahead of the watchful Guild is a lot for anyone, but Sera is about to discover that she doesn’t have to do it alone... and that the weird, wonderful family she’s made might be the best magic of all.]]> 352 Sangu Mandanna 0593439376 Melanie 0 to-read 4.63 2025
author: Sangu Mandanna
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209192698 In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.Ěý

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.]]> 320 Ina Garten 0593799895 Melanie 4 2025, making_food, memoir 4.24 2024
author: Ina Garten
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: 2025, making_food, memoir
review:

]]> 135965177
Monday 17 July 1922. Back from Garsington, & too unsettled to write - I meant to say read; but then this does not count as writing. It is to me like scratching; or, if it goes well, like having a bath - which of course, I did not get at Garsington.

1920. The war is over, and Virginia Woolf is meeting friends old and new, from Maynard Keynes to Vita Sackville-West. She is reading and reviewing voraciously, and the Hogarth Press is thriving. Jacob's Room was published in 1922, and Woolf began work on what was to become Mrs Dalloway. This was a time of creative highs and lows, as well as a growing confidence as Woolf developed her distinctive literary voice.]]> 585 Virginia Woolf 1783788704 Melanie 4 the-woolves, 2025 4.00 1978
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: the-woolves, 2025
review:

]]> 199531653 A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret.

Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim as she freely uses her beauty and charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret; once they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang Dynasty China.

A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both, in a sparkling, affluent city where everything runs like clockwork and any deviation from the norm is automatically suspect.

Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Reimagining the Chinese folktale “The Legend of the White Snake,â€� this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.Ěý]]> 272 Amanda Lee Koe 006335506X Melanie 0 to-read 3.78 2024
author: Amanda Lee Koe
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51704137 Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.]]> 69 Audre Lorde 0143135201 Melanie 0 to-read 4.49 1980
author: Audre Lorde
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.49
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196218600
This Warbler Classics annotated edition
� fifteen illustrations,
� an afterword by Ulrich Baer,
� a detailed biographical timeline, and
� an extensive index.

From the “The true gardener must be brutal, and imaginative for the future.� “The behavior of plants is indeed inexplicable. It breaks all the rules; and that is what makes gardening so endlessly various and interesting.� “I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.� “Naturally, every garden must be a law to itself.� “You cannot expect your soil and your plants to go on giving you of their best if you are not prepared to give something back in return. This is as true of gardens as of human relationships.� “The only thing is to be bold; try the experiment; find out.� Vita Sackville-West (1892�1962) was an award-winning English author who published numerous collections of poetry and thirteen novels, in addition to immensely popular gardening columns for The Observer from 1946�1961. With her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, she designed the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst in Kent, England. Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University, a graduate of Harvard and Yale, and the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. He has published widely on literature and photography, written new introductions to many classic books, and gardens avidly in New York City.]]> 159 Vita Sackville-West 1959891871 Melanie 0 to-read 0.0 1977
author: Vita Sackville-West
name: Melanie
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 224003158 “The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable…I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.� —Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

An unforgettable new novel from the “powerfully original� (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) author of the cult classic I Love Dick—a stark, witty journey into a fractured, violent America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called “meth community,� the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.

At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota—between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range—Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers� lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.

Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.]]> 320 Chris Kraus 1668098687 Melanie 0 to-read 4.00
author: Chris Kraus
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 140390939
Questions of care, intimacy, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to understand the world and its possibilities for human flourishing. In Lean On Me feminist thinker Lynne Segal goes in search of hope in her own life and in the world around her. She finds it entwined in our intimate commitments to each other and our shared collective endeavours.

Segal calls this shared dependence 'radical care'. In recounting from her own life the moments of motherhood, and of being on the front line of second-wave feminism, she draws upon lessons from more than half a century of engagement in left feminist politics, with its underlying commitment to building a more egalitarian and nurturing world. The personal and the political combine in this rallying cry to transform radically how we approach education, motherhood, and our everyday vulnerabilities of disability, ageing, and enhanced needs.

Only by confronting head-on these different forms of interdependence and care can we change the way we think about the environment and learn to struggle � together —against impending climate catastrophe.]]> 256 Lynne Segal 180429294X Melanie 0 to-read 3.48
author: Lynne Segal
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.48
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a Black infantryman during the Vietnam War, alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless� clash with a Texan fundamentalist church, O SINNERS! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel What is it that we seek from cults and, inevitably, from each other?]]> 464 Nicole Cuffy 0593597443 Melanie 0 to-read 3.56 2025
author: Nicole Cuffy
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 14918047 334 Mina Loy 0912330465 Melanie 0 to-read 4.57 1923
author: Mina Loy
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Melanie 5 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: 2018, ebook, activism-and-social-justice, 2025, race-in-america
review:

]]> 217078746
Among the pieces featured in the 2025 edition are:

Rich data visualizations of forest fires, ice melt, and bodies found in bogs

A list of objects left on the moon�

A checklist for signs of spring in NYC�

Herbal tips for every month from Anima Mundi herbals�

Recipes for making seasonal food from foraged edibles

A column on birding throughout the seasons in NYC

A eulogy for Flaco (the Central Park owl)�

A history of the iconic "Happy to Serve You" deli coffee cup

A photo essay about the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo�

A look at an NYC feud between two fish spots on City Island

Obituaries for recently extinct animals and plants�

--

With contributions by: Adriana Ayales, Anne Kadet, Baseera Khan, The Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, Cy X, Day Brièrre, Debarati Sarkar, Hirad Sab, Indigo Goodson-Fields, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Jeffrey Gibson, Jia Sung, Jordan Nassar, Jose Sanabria Aka Who Tattoo, Julie Rossman, Kay Kasparhauser, Meredith Celeste Lawder, Merry, Michael Pollan, Morgan Lett, Naomi Klein, Nora N. Khan, Or Zubalsky, Pascal Baudar, Paula Querido, Qais Assali, Roberto Lugo, Sally DeWind, Sky Hopinka, Sonya Renee Taylor, Spencer Tilger, Tauba Auerbach, Vivien Sansour, Willa Köerner, Winona LaDuke, Yasaman Sheri and Yemi Amu/Oko Farms]]> 140 Ana Ratner 1682196321 Melanie 0 currently-reading 5.00
author: Ana Ratner
name: Melanie
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 38473 In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a boy like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

In his award-winning play, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated--and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.]]> 144 James Baldwin 0679761780 Melanie 4 2025, race-in-america, ebook 4.16 1964
author: James Baldwin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: 2025, race-in-america, ebook
review:

]]> 200174240
The small, rundown village of Great Diddling is full of stories—author Berit Gardner can feel it. The way the villagers avoid outsiders, the furtive stares and whispers in the presence of newcomers� Berit can sense the edge of a story waiting to be unraveled, and she's just the person to do it. In fact, with a book deadline looming over her and no manuscript (not even the idea for a manuscript, truth be told), Berit doesn't just want this story. She needs it.

Then, while attending a village tea party, Berit becomes part of the action herself. An explosion in the library of the village's grand manor kills a local man, and the resulting investigation and influx of outsiders sends the quiet, rundown community into chaos. The residents of Great Diddling, each one more eccentric and interesting than any character Berit could have invented, rewrite their own narrative and transform the death of one of their own from a tragedy into a new beginning. Taking advantage of Great Diddling's new notoriety, the villagers band together to start a book and murder festival designed to bring desperately-needed tourists to their town. What they couldn't have predicted is how the new story they've begun to tell will change all their lives forever.]]> 392 Katarina Bivald 1728295769 Melanie 4 2025, mystery-and-intrigue 3.60 2024
author: Katarina Bivald
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: 2025, mystery-and-intrigue
review:

]]> 123087784 The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.�

With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.]]> 270 Margaret Renkl 1954118465 Melanie 0 to-read 4.17 2023
author: Margaret Renkl
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123012868 Ěý
The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.Ěý Ěý
Ěý
In Performance All the Way Down , MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.
Ěý
Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.]]> 403 Richard O. Prum 0226829782 Melanie 0 to-read 3.85
author: Richard O. Prum
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 563798 Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth-century fiction.]]> 232 William S. Burroughs Melanie 4 1993-1999 3.28 1959
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: 1993-1999
review:

]]> 208580597 The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory�, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.]]> 384 Johanna Hedva 163893116X Melanie 0 to-read 3.85
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 209654451 112 James Baldwin 1636811329 Melanie 0 to-read 4.86
author: James Baldwin
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.86
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 212923973
In 2018, during an interview with journalist Tanya Pearson, Shirley Manson lamented: “It’s a blanket fact that after September 11th, nonconformist women were taken off the radio.� This comment echoed a reality Pearson had personally witnessed as a musician and a fan, and launched her into a quest to figure out just what happened to these extraordinary female figures.

PRETEND WE’RE DEAD seeks to answer two big questions: First, where did all these wildly different, politically conscious, and supremely talented women in rock come from in the 1990s? And second, after their unprecedented breakout, why did they vanish from the mainstream by the early aughts? Along with analysis and narrative, PRETEND WE’RE DEAD is built on exclusive interviews with the unfiltered voices of legends including: Shirley Manson, Melissa Auf der Maur, Patty Schemel, Kate Schellenbach, Nina Gordon, Louise Post, Josephine Wiggs, Tanya Donelly, Kristin Hersh, Tracy Bonham, Donita Sparks, Liz Phair, Zia McCabe, Tracy Bonham, Lori Barbero, Josephine Wiggs, and Jill Emery. Through thought-provoking conversations, these women explore how they fell in love with music and started bands; fought labels, their coverage in the media, and sexism; and wrote deeply political and feminist music. Readers also learn about the effects of Woodstock �99, the corporatization of the music industry, the rise of Clear Channel and its ties to the Bush administration, and finally the nationalist sentiment after 9/11.

While sonically diverse, these musicians all wrote fierce, socially conscious, feminist lyrics, and PRETEND WE’RE DEAD commemorates and celebrates the overlooked contributions of true trailblazers.]]> 256 Tanya Pearson 0306833379 Melanie 0 to-read 3.85 2025
author: Tanya Pearson
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26530356 A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

"Nimura paints history in cinematic strokes and brings a forgotten story to vivid, unforgettable life." ―Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors―Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda―grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels and traditional clothing exclaimed over by newspapers across the nation. As they learned English and Western customs, their American friends grew to love them for their high spirits and intellectual brilliance. The passionate relationships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan―a land grown foreign to them―determined to revolutionize women’s education. Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, including decades of letters from between the three women and their American host families, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment. Map; 8 pages of illustrations]]> 352 Janice P. Nimura 0393352781 Melanie 0 to-read 3.83 2015
author: Janice P. Nimura
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209455852 A prescient literary mystery about corporate espionage, family dynamics, and the follow-up to Jane Pek’s “thoroughly modern twist on classic detective fiction,â€� The Verifiers (New York Times Book Review)“Exhilaratingly well-written. I loved it so much that I didn’t want it to end.â€� —Emily St. John Mandel on The VerifiersClaudia Lin—mystery novel superfan and, until recently, clichĂ©d underemployed English major—has scored her dream co-running Veracity, a dating detective agency whose mission is to determine if chronically online New Yorkers are telling the truth about themselves to their prospectiveĚýpartners. Unfortunately, along the way, she and her colleagues—tech wizard Squirrel, and the beautiful and intimidating Becks—have uncovered a nefarious AI conspiracy. And the corrupt corporate matchmakers may be resorting to murder to protect their secrets.Luckily,Ěýa client’s ex is ready toĚýturn on his employers—slipping Claudia thumb drives and setting up secret meetings to exchange information about what the company is up to behind the scenes.ĚýBut even as Claudia starts to get a feel for this new genre—just call her Lin, Claudia Lin—she's distracted by the romantic tension with both Becks and aĚýflirtatious and charming target. There’s also the fear that her older brother, Charles, is unwittingly falling into the corporation's deadly web through his consulting work. How can you know who to trust ifĚýyouĚýare keeping secrets and lying to those you love? How real are the carefully constructed identities we present to the world, online and off? The Rivals simultaneously skewers and celebrates spy stories while also revealing the ways technology is reshaping who we think we are.]]> 416 Jane Pek 059347015X Melanie 4 2025, mystery-and-intrigue 3.58 2024
author: Jane Pek
name: Melanie
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: 2025, mystery-and-intrigue
review:

]]> 212924165 Acclaimed embroidery designer and the best-selling author of Mystical Stitches, Christi Johnson, teaches how to create original stitch designs and expand creativity, with sketchbook and sampler exercises and inspiring examples from a wide range of embroidery artists, both historical and contemporary.

This colorful sourcebook, packed with practical technique instructions accompanied by inspiring examples from a wide range of embroidery artists, is sure to jump-start every stitching enthusiast's creativity, and build the skills for making original designs. Written for all levels of stitchers, The Art of Embroidery Design teaches the value of establishing a creative practice, with hands-on sketching and stitching exercises to help anyone build confidence in their design skills, whether or not they can draw. Author Christi Johnson breaks the design process down into approachable steps developing a vision; choosing a color palette; using variations in line weight to create dimensionality; and achieving a range of textural effects. Dozens of photos of the author's own work are accompanied by historical examples from artisans in Mexico, India, Peru, China, Nigeria, and more. Profiles of some of the most inventive contemporary embroidery artists illuminate the sources of their inspiration, and round out the rich, full offerings of this complete workshop in a book.Ěý

Ěý]]> 200 Christi Johnson 1635867665 Melanie 5 2025, art-craft, stitchery 4.52
author: Christi Johnson
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: 2025, art-craft, stitchery
review:
Christi Johnson is an incredible artist and a wonderful teacher, and this book perfectly encapsulates what’s so magical about her embroidery work and the open-hearted guidance she provides to the stitching community. The text is lovely and the images are sumptuous—seriously, the best photos of embroidery that I’ve ever seen! The level of detail, texture, and care in every image is just gorgeous, and works perfectly in tandem with Christi’s embroidery and design wisdom.
]]> 61757418
An old-fashioned London hotel is not quite as reputable as it makes out to be.�

When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service, and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly-polished veneer.

Yet, not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day.…]]> 273 Agatha Christie Melanie 4 2025, mystery-and-intrigue 4.12 1965
author: Agatha Christie
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: 2025, mystery-and-intrigue
review:

]]> 59753145 ]]> 305 Rudolph Fisher 1464215979 Melanie 0 to-read 4.42 1932
author: Rudolph Fisher
name: Melanie
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1932
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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