Eliz's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:23:20 -0700 60 Eliz's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich]]> 708735
In Frauen we hear their voices––most for the first time. Alison Owings interviewed and here records the words of twenty-nine German women who were there: Working for the Resistance. Joining the Nazi Party. Outsmarting the Gestapo. Disliking a Jewish neighbor. Hiding a Jewish friend. Witnessing "Kristallnacht." Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. Shooting at Allied planes. Welcoming Allied troops. Being a prisoner. And being a guard. The women recall their own and others' enthusiasm, doubt, fear, fury, cowardice, guilt, and anguish.

Alison Owings, in her pursuit of such memories, was invited into the homes of these women. Because she is neither Jewish nor German, and because she speaks fluent colloquial German, many of the women she interviewed felt comfortable enough with her to unlock the past. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as they surprised the women themselves.

Not since Marcel Ophuls's controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy." In this case, the story is that of the women, those who did not make policy but were forced to participate in its effects and to witness its results. What they did and did not do is not just a reflection on them and their country––it also leads us to question what actions we might have taken in their place. The interviews do not allow for easy, smug answers.]]> 536 Alison Owings 0813522005 Eliz 0 to-read 4.06 1993 Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich
author: Alison Owings
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America]]> 207567756 An investigation into the rise of the Christian right over the last half-century that lays out the grim vision Evangelicals are enforcing on our democracy.

All across America, a storm is gathering: from book bans in school libraries to anti-trans laws in state legislatures; firebombings of abortion clinics and protests against gay rights. The Christian Right, a cunning political force in America for more than half a century, has never been more powerful than it is right now—it propelled Donald Trump to power, and it won’t stop until it’s refashioned America in its own image.

In Wild Faith, critically acclaimed author Talia Lavin goes deep into what motivates the Christian Right, from its segregationist past to a future riddled with apocalyptic ideology.

Using primary sources and firsthand accounts, Lavin introduces you to “deliverance ministers� who carry out exorcisms by the hundreds; modern-day, self-proclaimed prophets and apostles; Christian militias, cults, zealots, and showmen; and the people in power who are aiding them to achieve their goals.

Along the way, she explores anti-abortion terrorists, the Christian Patriarchy movement, with its desire to place all women under absolute male control; the twisted theology that leads to rampant child abuse; and the ways conspiracy theorists and extremist Christians influence each other to mutual political benefit.

From school boards to the Supreme Court, Christian theocracy is ascendant in America—and only through exploring its motivations and impacts can we understand the crisis we face. In Wild Faith, Lavin fearlessly confronts whether our democracy can survive an organized, fervent theocratic movement, one that seeks to impose its religious beliefs on American citizens.]]> 304 Talia Lavin 0306829193 Eliz 0 to-read 4.26 Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America
author: Talia Lavin
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mass Psychology of Fascism]]> 781662
Drawing on his medical experiences with men and women of various classes, races, nations, and religious beliefs, Reich refutes the still generally held notion that fascism is a specific characteristic of certain nationalities or a political party ideology that is imposed on innocent people by means of force or political maneuvers. "Fascism on only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man's character. It is the basic emotional civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life."—Wilhelm Reich

Responsibility for the elimination of fascism thus results with the masses of average people who might otherwise support and champion it.]]> 395 Wilhelm Reich 0374508844 Eliz 0 to-read 4.06 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascism
author: Wilhelm Reich
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1933
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Different Chapter, Same Verse (Vol. 1): Genesis/Exodus (Rabbi Jack Moline: Different Chapter, Same Verse)]]> 218300961 275 Jack Moline Eliz 0 to-read 0.0 Different Chapter, Same Verse (Vol. 1): Genesis/Exodus (Rabbi Jack Moline: Different Chapter, Same Verse)
author: Jack Moline
name: Eliz
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live]]> 55298398

In the surprising, often fiercely feminist and always fascinating The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the field’s history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies. These women—and they were mostly women—became chemists and marketers, studied nutrition, health, and exercise, tested parachutes, created astronaut food, and took bold steps in childhood development and education.


Home economics followed the currents of American culture even as it shaped them. Dreilinger brings forward the racism within the movement along with the strides taken by women of color who were influential leaders and innovators. She also looks at the personal lives of home economics� women, as they chose to be single, share lives with other women, or try for egalitarian marriages.


This groundbreaking and engaging history restores a denigrated subject to its rightful importance, as it reminds us that everyone should learn how to cook a meal, balance their account, and fight for a better world.]]> 368 Danielle Dreilinger 1324004495 Eliz 0 to-read 3.87 2021 The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
author: Danielle Dreilinger
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters]]> 195791735 The definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?

In The Rulebreaker , Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.

Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.]]> 464 Susan Page 1982197927 Eliz 0
What stuck with me:
How tightly white men held/hold onto power and control and how incredibly challenging it was/is for white women to break through at all;
How comfort in the “elite� social circles that Walters moved in eased her rise;
How this social circle facilitated and legitimized illegal actions of friends like Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. Chilling. ]]> 3.85 2024 The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
author: Susan Page
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves:
review:
Glad to have read it, though all the jobs and contracts and husbands and romantic partners and financial complications and interviewees get confusing.

What stuck with me:
How tightly white men held/hold onto power and control and how incredibly challenging it was/is for white women to break through at all;
How comfort in the “elite� social circles that Walters moved in eased her rise;
How this social circle facilitated and legitimized illegal actions of friends like Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. Chilling.
]]> <![CDATA[Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America]]> 52274929 From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Kendzior comes the bitingly honest examination of the erosion of American liberty and the calculated rise to power of Donald Trump.

The rise of Donald Trump may have shocked Americans, but it should not have surprised them. His anti-democratic movement is the culmination of a decades-long breakdown of U.S. institutions. The same blindness to U.S. decline � particularly the loss of economic stability for the majority of the population and opportunity-hoarding by the few � is reflected in an unwillingness to accept that authoritarianism can indeed thrive in the so-called “home of the free�.

As Americans struggle to reconcile the gulf between a flagrant aspiring autocrat and the democratic precepts they had been told were sacred and immutable, the inherent fragility of American democracy has been revealed. Hiding in Plain Sight exposes this continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States that have been hiding in plain sight for decades. In Kendzior’s signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump’s meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers.

Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her personal life and her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time � living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied.

Hiding in Plain Sight is about confronting injustice � an often agonizing process, but an honest and necessary one � as the only way that offers the possibility of ending it.

]]> 320 Sarah Kendzior Eliz 5
Read it and weep. ]]> 4.42 2020 Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
author: Sarah Kendzior
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK! We should have read it 5 years ago, actually, and possibly we would not be where we are at this moment. It reads like crazy conspiracy theory � but unfortunately this crazy conspiracy comes with footnotes and documentation. So many strings that will never be unraveled, and many that will no doubt be secreted away.

Read it and weep.
]]> <![CDATA[The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience]]> 3789698
Frances Perkins was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. As the first female cabinet secretary, she spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of America’s working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities. Perkins’s ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare and legislation in the nation’s history, including unemployment compensation, child labor laws, and the forty-hour work week.

Arriving in Washington at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins pushed for massive public works projects that created millions of jobs for unemployed workers. She breathed life back into the nation’s labor movement, boosting living standards across the country. As head of the Immigration Service, she fought to bring European refugees to safety in the United States. Her greatest triumph was creating Social Security.

Written with a wit that echoes Frances Perkins’s own, award-winning journalist Kirstin Downey gives us a riveting exploration of how and why Perkins slipped into historical oblivion, and restores Perkins to her proper place in history.]]> 458 Kirstin Downey 0385513658 Eliz 0 to-read 4.19 2009 The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience
author: Kirstin Downey
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism]]> 44453035 For readers of Democracy in Chains and Dark Money, a revelatory investigation of the Religious Right's rise to political power.

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. But in her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: America's Religious Right has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement. It seeks to gain political power and impose its vision on society. It isn't fighting a culture war; it is waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart shows that the real power of the movement lies in a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations, embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances with like-minded, anti-democratic religious nationalists around the world, including Russia. She follows the money behind the movement and traces much of it to a group of super-wealthy, ultra-conservative donors and family foundations. The Christian nationalist movement is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.

The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart's probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and American democratic freedoms.]]> 352 Katherine Stewart 1635573432 Eliz 0 to-read 4.25 2020 The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
author: Katherine Stewart
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children]]> 537661 304 Wendy Mogel 0142196002 Eliz 0 4.15 2001 The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children
author: Wendy Mogel
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read, decided-not-to-finish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Child's Gonna Live (Contemporary Classics by Women)]]> 361096
“Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman’s perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.”� The New York Times , 2009

Originally published in 1969 to broad critical acclaim, This Child's Gonna Live is an unsurpassed testament to human endurance in the face of poverty, racism, and despair. Set in a fishing village on Maryland's Eastern Shore in the 1930s, this story has as its main character the unforgettable Mariah Upshur, a hard-working, sensual, resilient woman, full of hope, and determination despite living in a society that conspires to keep her down. In her mind, she carries on a conversation with Jesus, who, like Mariah herself, is passionate and compassionate, at times funny and resolutely resilient to fatalism. Often compared to Zora Neale Hurston for her lyrical and sure-handed use of local dialect, Wright, like Hurston, powerfully depicts the predicament of poor African American women, who confront the multiple oppressions of class, race, and gender.]]> 320 Sarah E. Wright 1558613978 Eliz 0 to-read 3.92 1969 This Child's Gonna Live (Contemporary Classics by Women)
author: Sarah E. Wright
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> We Were the Lucky Ones 12806845 312 Esther Neier Fleishman 0615279600 Eliz 0 to-read 4.26 2009 We Were the Lucky Ones
author: Esther Neier Fleishman
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Small Change (Small Change, #1)]]> 34878010
Christopher Lucen opened a coffee and sandwich joint in South Philly because he wanted to be part of a community after years of running from place to place, searching for something he could never quite name. Now, he relishes the familiarity of knowing what his customers want, and giving it to them. But what he really wants now is love.

When they meet, Christopher is smitten, but Ginger � isn’t quite so sure. Christopher’s gorgeous, and kind, and their opposites-attract chemistry is off the charts. But hot sex is one thing—truly falling for someone? Terrifying. When her world starts to crumble around her, Ginger has to face the fact that this fight can only be won by being vulnerable—this fight, she can’t win on her own.

Small Change is the first in a series that is set in the Middle of Somewhere universe. It features crossover characters from that series but stands on its own. The Small Change series will include M/F and M/M romances.]]> 285 Roan Parrish 0998967114 Eliz 0 to-read 4.02 2017 Small Change (Small Change, #1)
author: Roan Parrish
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Holiday Trap 59828774 For fans of Alexandria Bellefleur and Alexis Hall comes a charming, hilarious, and heartwarming LGBTQIA+ romcom about two separate couples finding love over the holidays from acclaimed author Roan Parrish!

Greta Russakoff loves her tight-knit family and tiny Maine hometown, even if they don't always understand what it's like to be a lesbian living in such a small world. She desperately needs space to figure out who she is.

Truman Belvedere has just had his heart crushed into a million pieces when he learned that his boyfriend of almost a year has a secret life that includes a husband and a daughter. Reeling from this discovery, all he wants is a place to lick his wounds far, far away from New Orleans.

Enter Greta and Truman's mutual friend, Ramona, who facilitates a month-long house swap. Over the winter holidays, each of them will have a chance to try on a new life...and maybe fall in love with the perfect partner of their dreams. But all holidays must come to an end, and eventually Greta and Truman will have to decide whether the love they each found so far from home is worth fighting for.]]> 442 Roan Parrish 1728256275 Eliz 0 3.50 2022 The Holiday Trap
author: Roan Parrish
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
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Sweet! Listened to the audiobook.
]]> <![CDATA[The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time]]> 25387895 From the New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind, a compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con artists—and the people who fall for their cons over and over again

While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen—the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs—are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book.

From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us.]]> 352 Maria Konnikova 0525427414 Eliz 0 to-read 3.61 2015 The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time
author: Maria Konnikova
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> King Rat (Asian Saga, #4) 9827 368 James Clavell 0385333765 Eliz 0 to-read 4.15 1962 King Rat (Asian Saga, #4)
author: James Clavell
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> Fellow Travelers 701724
Washington, D.C., in the early 1950 a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Into this fevered city steps Timothy Laughlin, a recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim’s first job in D.C. and–after Fuller’s advances–his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives� in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit and intrigue, and clinging to the friendship of a beautiful young woman named Mary Johnson, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions, his love for God, and his love for Fuller–an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.

Moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star , the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO’s front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is energized by high political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak. It is Thomas Mallon’s most accomplished and daring novel to date.]]> 356 Thomas Mallon 0375423486 Eliz 0 to-read 3.56 2007 Fellow Travelers
author: Thomas Mallon
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Good Dirt 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 Eliz 0 to-read 4.07 2025 Good Dirt
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Host for the Holidays (Christmas Escape)]]> 62799144
Madi

After two years and zero proposals, my relationship could use a little spark. Paris during the holidays seems like just the ticket—one perfect, final opportunity for my boyfriend to take things to the next level.

The fact that he’s rented me the tiny servant quarters in the apartment of a very good-looking Frenchman is . . . puzzling. And when he asks that Frenchman to take me around the city while he’s busy at work trainings? Color me confused.

Is this some sort of pre-engagement test? If so, I’m not sure I’m doing too hot.

é

Offering to host my friend’s vacation rental means making sure the first review is five solid, sparkling stars. When the guest who shows up is a beautiful American woman, I’m thinking my task might be more enjoyable than I thought. Until I find out she has a boyfriend. Madi deserves to have an amazing time in Paris, though, so I’m more than happy to oblige when the guy asks me to show her the city.

It’s cool. I’m cool. This is all for that five-star review�


� Host for the Holidays is a closed door romance full of fun, chemistry, and a generous dash of the magic of Paris]]> 378 Martha Keyes Eliz 0 4.03 2022 Host for the Holidays (Christmas Escape)
author: Martha Keyes
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:
Listened to the audiobook because Christmas movie season is over and I was looking for something light. I did listen to the whole thing - if I was reading, I would have just skimmed and finished in a couple hours. Trite phrases, witty banter, and over the top language as this couple realizes they are absolutely perfect for one another and can’t bear to be apart. Happily, no graphic sex scenes.
]]> <![CDATA[All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir]]> 61357133
An incredibly thoughtful, disarmingly funny, and intensely vulnerable glimpse into the life and ministry of a woman familiar to many but known by few.

“It’s a peculiar thing, this having lived long enough to take a good look back. We go from knowing each other better than we know ourselves to barely sure if we know each other at all, to precisely sure that we don’t. All my knotted-up life I’ve longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who’s good and who’s bad. I’ve wanted to know this about myself as much as anyone. This was not theological. It was strictly relational. God could do what he wanted with eternity. I was just trying to make it here in the meantime. As benevolent as he has been in a myriad of ways, God has remained aloof on this uncomplicated request .� � Beth Moore

New York Times best-selling author, speaker, visionary, and founder of Living Proof Ministries Beth Moore has devoted her whole life to helping women across the globe come to know the transforming power of Jesus. An established writer of many acclaimed books and Bible studies for women on spiritual growth and personal development, Beth now unveils her own story in a much-anticipated debut memoir.

All My Knotted-Up Life

All My Knotted-Up Life is told with surprising candor about some of the personal heartbreaks and behind-the-scenes challenges that have marked Beth’s life. But beyond that, it’s a beautifully crafted portrait of resilience and survival, a poignant reminder of God’s enduring faithfulness, and proof positive that if we ever truly took the time to hear people’s full stories . . . we’d all walk around slack-jawed.]]> 304 Beth Moore 1496472675 Eliz 0 to-read 4.43 2023 All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir
author: Beth Moore
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments]]> 63033521
Talking about death and dying is considered taboo in polite company, and even in the medical field. Our ideas about dying are confusing at Will our memories flash before our eyes? Regrets consume our thoughts? Does a bright light appear at the end of a tunnel? For most people, it will be a slower process, one eased with preparedness, good humor, and a bit of faith. At the forefront of changing attitudes around palliative care is hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos, who shows that end-of-life care can teach us just as much about how to live as it does about how we die.

Vlahos was raised in a strict religious household, but began questioning her beliefs in high school after the sudden death of a friend. When she got pregnant at nineteen, she was shunned by her community and enrolled herself in nursing school to be able to support herself and her baby. But nursing soon became more than that when she focused on palliative care and hospice work, it became a calling.

In The In-Between, Vlahos recounts the most impactful experiences she’s had with the people she’s worked with—from the woman who never once questioned her faith until she was close to death, to the older man seeing visions of his late daughter, to the young patient who laments that she spent too much of her short life worrying about what others thought of her—while also sharing her own fascinating journey.

Written with profound insight, humility, and respect, The In-Between is a heartrending memoir that shows how caring for others can transform a life while also offering wisdom and comfort for those dealing with loss and providing inspiration for how to live now.]]> 288 Hadley Vlahos 059349993X Eliz 5 4.47 2023 The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments
author: Hadley Vlahos
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:
Vulnerable, tender, thoughtful, honest. Among the many things I appreciated in this book was learning about the author’s experience with pregnancy, the value of Medicaid, the supports that are needed for both the beginning and the end of life, the challenges for so many of navigating our healthcare system. Highly recommend. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.
]]> <![CDATA[Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation]]> 123979787 320 Emily Van Duyne 1324006978 Eliz 0 to-read 4.23 2024 Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation
author: Emily Van Duyne
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife]]> 204158999 For readers of Remarkably Bright Creatures and A Man Called Ove, a warm, life-affirming debut about a zany case of mistaken identity that allows a lonely old man one last chance to be part of a family.

‘Would you mind terribly, old boy, if I borrowed the rest of your life? I promise I’ll take excellent care of it.'

Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.

Denise Simms is stuck breathing the same disappointing air again and again. A middle-aged mom and caregiver at Bernard's facility, her crumbling marriage and daughter's health concerns are suffocating her joy for life. Wounded by her two-faced husband, she vows never to let a man deceive her again.

As Fred walks in Bernard’s shoes, he leaves a trail of kindness behind him, fueling Denise's suspicions about his true identity. When unexpected truths are revealed, Fred and Denise rediscover their sense of purpose and learn how to return a broken life to mint condition.

Bittersweet and remarkably perceptive, The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife is a hilarious, feel-good, clever novel about grief, forgiveness, redemption, and finding family.]]> 336 Anna Johnston 0063397293 Eliz 0 to-read 4.28 2024 The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
author: Anna Johnston
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Is She Really Going Out with Him?]]> 208894884
Columnist Anna Appleby has left her love life behind after a painful divorce. Who needs a man when she has two kids, a cat, and uncontested control of the TV remote? Besides, she’d rather be single than subject herself to the hell of online dating. But her office rival is vying for her column, and no column means no stable source of income. In a desperate attempt to keep her job, Anna finds herself pitching a unique angle: seven dates, all found offline, chosen by her children.

From awkward encounters to unexpected connections, Anna gamely begins to put herself out there, asking out waiters, the mailman, and even her celebrity crush. But when a romantic connection appears where she least expected it, will she be brave enough to take another chance on love?]]> 368 Sophie Cousens 0593718909 Eliz 0 to-read 4.11 2024 Is She Really Going Out with Him?
author: Sophie Cousens
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Duke, Actually (Christmas in Eldovia, #2)]]> 56645928 USA Today bestselling author Jenny Holiday follows A Princess for Christmas with another delightful contemporary Christmas romance between a playboy baron and a woman who has said goodbye to love.

Maximillian von Hansburg, Baron of Laudon and heir to the Duke of Aquilla, is trapped. Under pressure from his domineering father, he must marry a suitable bride before he inherits a title that feels like a prison sentence. In New York to meet a prospective wife, he ditches his responsibilities and appears on Dani Martinez’s doorstep. He’s been intrigued by the no-nonsense professor since he met her at the Eldovian royal wedding and is determined to befriend her.

Newly single Dani is done with love—she even has a list entitled “Things I Will Never Again Do for a Man”—which is why she hits it off with notorious rake Max. He’s trying to escape relationships, and she’s resolved to avoid them at all costs. All they want from each other is friendship and a distraction from their messy lives.

As their bond begins to deepen, so does their attraction, until they end up in bed together. Falling in love was never part of the plan—Max’s family doesn’t see Dani as a perfect match, even as his heart tells him she’s the one, and Dani isn’t sure she can make it in Max’s world. Can they find the courage to live they life they desire, even if it means risking everything?]]> 400 Jenny Holiday 0062952080 Eliz 0 3.78 2021 Duke, Actually (Christmas in Eldovia, #2)
author: Jenny Holiday
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves:
review:
If I can’t watch a Christmas movie, at least I can listen to the story! Ah, Eldovia�.
]]> The Ship of Brides 20893485 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars, in an earlier work available in the U.S. for the first time, a post-WWII story of the war brides who crossed the seas by the thousands to face their unknown futures.

1946. World War II has ended and all over the world, young women are beginning to fulfill the promises made to the men they wed in wartime.

In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other war brides on an extraordinary voyage to England—aboard HMS Victoria, which still carries not just arms and aircraft but a thousand naval officers. Rules are strictly enforced, from the aircraft carrier’s captain down to the lowliest young deckhand. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined despite the Navy’s ironclad sanctions. And for Frances Mackenzie, the complicated young woman whose past comes back to haunt her far from home, the journey will change her life in ways she never could have predicted—forever.]]> 415 Jojo Moyes 0143126474 Eliz 0 3.80 2005 The Ship of Brides
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:
Hard to keep everyone straight, but it was a good distracting read. The granddaughter is annoying.
]]> Women of the Post 62325784 An emotional story, based on true events, about theall-Black battalion of the Women's Army Corps who foundpurpose, solidarity and lifelong friendship in their mission of sorting over one million pieces of mail for the US Army.

1944,New York City.Judy Washington is tired of working from dawn til dusk in the Bronx Slave Market, cleaning white women’s houses and barely making a dime. Her husband is fighting overseas, so it's up to Judy and her mother to make enough money for rent and food.When the chance arises for Judy to join the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and the ability to bring home a steady paycheck,she jumps at the opportunity.

Immediately upon arrival, Judy undergoes grueling military drills and inspections led by Second Officer Charity Adams, one of the only Black officers in the WAC. Judy becomes fast friends with the other women in her unit—Stacy, Bernadette and Mary Alyce—who only discovered she was Black after joining the army. Under Charity Adams’s direction, they are transferred to Birmingham, England, as part of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion—the only unit of Black women to serve overseas in WWII. Here, they must sorta backlog of over one million pieces of mail.

The women work tirelessly, knowing that they're reuniting soldiers to their loved ones through the letters they write. However, their work becomes personal when Mary Alyce discovers a backloggedletter addressed to Judy that will upend her personal life. Told through the alternating perspectives of Judy,Charity and Mary Alyce,Women of the Postis an unforgettable story of perseverance, female friendship, romance and self-discovery.]]> 368 Joshunda Sanders 0778334074 Eliz 0
Discouraging to reflect in the deeply entrenched racism at the heart of the US story; inspiring to be reminded about the ways so many have worked for change.

*1/2025 update: having just watched the movie, the book was much better! ]]> 3.92 2023 Women of the Post
author: Joshunda Sanders
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/14
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:
Interesting to learn about the Six Triple Eight battalion - looking forward to the movie!

Discouraging to reflect in the deeply entrenched racism at the heart of the US story; inspiring to be reminded about the ways so many have worked for change.

*1/2025 update: having just watched the movie, the book was much better!
]]> Slow Dance 198530925
They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha—Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed.

Now Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there—and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost.

It’s the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start.]]> 400 Rainbow Rowell 0063380196 Eliz 0 to-read 3.63 2024 Slow Dance
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Queen of Hearts 35142025 A powerful debut novel, praised by The New York Times, Bustle, and Hypable, that pulses with humor and empathy as it explores the heart's capacity for forgiveness....

Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early twenties, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers--Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.

As chief resident, Nick Xenokostas was the center of Zadie's life--both professionally and personally--throughout a tragic chain of events during her third year of medical school that she has long since put behind her. Nick's unexpected reappearance at a time of new professional crisis shocks both women into a deeper look at the difficult choices they made at the beginning of their careers. As it becomes evident that Emma must have known more than she revealed about circumstances that nearly derailed both their lives, Zadie starts to question everything she thought she knew about her closest friend.]]> 366 Kimmery Martin 0399585060 Eliz 0 to-read 3.59 2018 The Queen of Hearts
author: Kimmery Martin
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca]]> 50884573
Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir like the author's bestselling Cold Cream, and a voyage into a vanished moral world. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, its cryptic and unforgettable protagonist Munca joins the ranks of memorable aunts in literature, from Dickens' Betsy Trotwood to Graham Greene's Aunt Augusta.]]> 262 Ferdinand Mount 1472979427 Eliz 0 to-read 3.81 2020 Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca
author: Ferdinand Mount
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Month in Siena 43783430
A Month in Siena is the encounter, twenty-five years later, between the writer and the city he had worshipped from afar. It is a dazzling evocation of an extraordinary place and its effect on the writer's life. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.]]> 128 Hisham Matar 0241409500 Eliz 0 to-read 4.07 2019 A Month in Siena
author: Hisham Matar
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW's Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton]]> 211540193
But Doug Hegdahl was far from stupid. Possessing a razor-sharp memory, during the next two years he memorized the names of 254 fellow prisoners and senior officers ordered him to accept an early release. After coming home in August 1969, Hegdahl shocked his debriefers by rattling off the names of the men. Hanoi had admitted holding only a few dozen, although the U.S. military had reliable intel on scores of others. With Hegdahl’s names, 63 missing servicemen were reclassified to Prisoners of War.

But that’s not all. In addition to divulging the names, Doug Hegdahl told the Pentagon about the systematic torturing of the American POWs in Hanoi and reported many other hitherto unknown details about life inside the Hanoi POW camps. The new information became an important factor in North Vietnam’s fall 1969 decision to make life immeasurably easier for the 500-plus POWs held in Hanoi and assuaged the doubts and fears of dozens of POW families.

In a vividly written book based on archival research, personal interviews, and his experiences in the Vietnam War, Marc Leepson, for the first time, tells the incredible tale of the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam. Doug Hegdahl has never been properly recognized for his extraordinary efforts, and his story has never been fully told. It’s a story of survival—has own and scores of POWs.

As a U.S. Navy historian put the North Vietnamese “made a bad mistake when they released Seaman Doug Hegdahl.”]]> 312 Marc Leepson 0811772934 Eliz 0 to-read 4.04 The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW's Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton
author: Marc Leepson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Maid (Molly the Maid, #1) 55196813
Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life's complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly's orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what's happening, Molly's unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it's too late?

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.]]> 304 Nita Prose 0593356152 Eliz 5 3.71 2022 The Maid (Molly the Maid, #1)
author: Nita Prose
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
Loved, loved the audiobook. So very well narrated. Our sweet protagonist tries hard and works hard. Gran’s voice is tender and wise. Highly enjoyable.
]]> The Door-to-Door Bookstore 62192261 The charming international bestseller about an elderly bookseller who delivers his recommendations door-to-door and an unlikely friendship with a nine-year-old girl that changes his life, for fans of The Midnight Library and A Man Called Ove.

The bookseller Carl Christian Kollhoff delivers books to special customers in the evening hours after closing time, walking through the picturesque alleys of the city. These people are almost like friends to him, and he is their most important connection to the world.

When Kollhoff unexpectedly loses his job, it takes the power of books and a nine-year-old girl to make them all find the courage to rebuild their bonds with each other.

A bestselling phenomenon internationally,Carsten Henn’sThe Door-to-Door Bookstoreis a feel-good novel about books and friendship.]]> 239 Carsten Henn 133549085X Eliz 0 to-read 4.07 2020 The Door-to-Door Bookstore
author: Carsten Henn
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Caretaker 75500179 Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash ("One of the great American authors at work today" --The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.

It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Lampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob's wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clare is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town's most elegant hotel. When Naomi elopes with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalizes the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherit him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.]]> 252 Ron Rash 0385544278 Eliz 0 to-read 4.12 2023 The Caretaker
author: Ron Rash
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Burning House 208674406 250 Dennis A Tomlinson Eliz 0 to-read 5.00 Burning House
author: Dennis A Tomlinson
name: Eliz
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art]]> 28118491
Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life.

Her gamble paid At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women , acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.]]> 944 Mary Gabriel 0316226181 Eliz 0
I have a new appreciation for the artists and their male companions. ]]> 4.51 2018 Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
author: Mary Gabriel
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
Started with the audiobook but didn’t finish on first checkout. Or on the second or third checkout. Bought the book but finished it with the 4th checkout when I made it back up the holds list. Loved the book, even though it took me so long to get through it!

I have a new appreciation for the artists and their male companions.
]]> Pointe of Pride 199598616
But the second she steps off the plane, she runs into trouble—and intoNick Jacobs, the most uptight, judgmental, inconveniently attractive man she's ever met. And to their mutual horror, Nick is also in Sydney for a wedding. The same wedding. In which he is the best man.

Carly will do anything for her best friend, including running all over Sydney with Nick—Nick who has his life together, Nick who's made the transition out of ballet into photography so perfectly, Nick who has the most irritatingly sharp cheekbones and stormy blue eyes. And when the director of New York Ballet announces that she'll be making her decision about promotions ahead of schedule, Carly chooses to stay in Sydney, even if it means shelving her pride to ask Nick for help.

Nick Jacobs is coming back to Sydney with a secret . His life in Paris, where he recently retired from ballet, has fallen apart. With no girlfriend and no new career to speak of, Nick can't bear to tell his friends at home the humiliating truth. And after fifteen years dancing overseas, what does home even mean anymore?

Nick doesn't want to team up with Carly Montgomery, a human hurricane who creates chaos every time she walks in the room, but sparring with her makes him feel the most alive he's felt in months. When she asks him for help securing her promotion, he sees an opportunity to kickstart his own flagging career. Looking at Carly through his lens all day starts to change how Nick sees her, and soon, he can't stop staring. Carly's a human hand grenade, but suddenly Nick wouldn't mind pulling the pin.

When she finds out the truth about him, though, the explosion might destroy them both.]]> 336 Chloe Angyal Eliz 0 3.97 2024 Pointe of Pride
author: Chloe Angyal
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
Stayed up late on “vacation� with this book, after a hard day. A light romance with likable characters AND with ballet thrown in, and then to find out the author is married to Iowa state Senator Zach Walls, whom I greatly admire - chef’s kiss!
]]> Caucasia 33795 䲹ܳ�Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel andnational bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire.

Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).]]> 413 Danzy Senna 1573227161 Eliz 0 decided-not-to-finish 4.07 1998 Caucasia
author: Danzy Senna
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: decided-not-to-finish
review:
Gave up on the audiobook. It might be better to read, so that I could skim. Slow beginning � and that’s about as far as I got. 14%
]]> <![CDATA[Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food]]> 199566953 336 Michelle T. King 1324021284 Eliz 0 to-read 3.81 Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food
author: Michelle T. King
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mom & Me & Mom 15798797 Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,� revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.

Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise to the heights.]]> 201 Maya Angelou 1400066115 Eliz 0 to-read 4.20 2013 Mom & Me & Mom
author: Maya Angelou
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On the Move: A Life 24972194 On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.

With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions—weight lifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who influenced him.

On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer—and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.]]> 397 Oliver Sacks 0385352549 Eliz 0 to-read 3.98 2015 On the Move: A Life
author: Oliver Sacks
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Remarkable Creatures 6457081
Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.

Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils.

The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and jealousy.]]> 352 Tracy Chevalier 0007178379 Eliz 0 to-read 3.87 2009 Remarkable Creatures
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> One Summer: America, 1927 17262366 One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.

The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin “Shipwreck� Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true “talking picture,� Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.
All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.]]> 456 Bill Bryson 0767919408 Eliz 0 to-read 4.08 2013 One Summer: America, 1927
author: Bill Bryson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> A Town Called Solace 56048572 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

New York Times bestselling author Mary Lawson, acclaimed for digging into the "wilderness of the human heart", is back after almost a decade with a fresh and timely novel that is different in subject but just as emotional and atmospheric as her beloved earlier work.

A Town Called Solace—the brilliant and emotionally radiant new novel from Mary Lawson, her first in nearly a decade—opens on a family in rebellious teenager Rose been missing for weeks with no word, and Rose's younger sister, the feisty and fierce Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping for her sibling's return.

Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door—watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. Orchard, owns that home. Around the time of Rose's disappearance, Mrs. Orchard was sent for a short stay in hospital, and Clara promised to keep an eye on the house and its remaining occupant, Mrs. Orchard's cat, Moses. As the novel unfolds, so does the mystery of what has transpired between Mrs. Orchard and the newly arrived stranger.

Told through three distinct, compelling points of view—Clara's, Mrs. Orchard's, and Liam Kane's—the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose. A Town Called Solace is a masterful, suspenseful and deeply humane novel by one of our great storytellers.]]> 272 Mary Lawson 0735281289 Eliz 0 to-read 4.23 2021 A Town Called Solace
author: Mary Lawson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> <![CDATA[One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter]]> 30658435 A collection of essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada, "a land of ice and casual racism," by the cultural observer, Scaachi Koul.

In One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humour to share her fears, outrages and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of colour, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father's creeping mortality--all as she tries to find her feet in the world.]]> 241 Scaachi Koul 0385685351 Eliz 0 to-read 3.72 2017 One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In]]> 45046838 For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature.

In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents.

Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man’s bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the �80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.]]> 320 Phuc Tran 1250194717 Eliz 0 to-read 4.29 2020 Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In
author: Phuc Tran
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> H is for Hawk 18803640
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

Destined to be a classic of nature writing, "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for "The Once and Future King." It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.]]> 300 Helen Macdonald 0224097008 Eliz 0 3.73 2014 H is for Hawk
author: Helen Macdonald
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/21
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review:
Beautifully written and narrated. Long. Read for a book club, or I would never have read it.
]]> We All Want Impossible Things 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 Eliz 0 3.96 2022 We All Want Impossible Things
author: Catherine Newman
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/21
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A good companion on several flights. I admire people who can whip up delicious meals and gather people together. Accurate in the way we learn so much about caregiving as needed, and the way it becomes all encompassing. A beautiful reflection of family and community.
]]> Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n� roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 Eliz 0 to-read 4.20 2019 Daisy Jones & The Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence]]> 60784754 A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose extraordinary poetry set African American literature at the heart of the American Revolution.



Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. "Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?" By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. Her life demonstrated that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery. Indeed, she helped make it so.

In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the deepest account to date of Wheatley's life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, "Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond'rous instinct) Ethiopians speak."]]> 496 David Waldstreicher 0809098245 Eliz 0 to-read 3.80 2023 The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
author: David Waldstreicher
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> <![CDATA[House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby's Cafeterias]]> 421384 Citation, San Antonio Conservation Society, 2009 Scarred by the deaths of his mother and sisters and the failure of his father's business, a young man dreamed of making enough money to retire early and retreat into the secure world that his childhood tragedies had torn from him. But Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning totally against the tide of avaricious capitalism, he determined to make a fortune by doing good. Starting with that unlikely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby founded a cafeteria empire that by the 1980s had revenues second only to McDonald's. So successfully did Luby and his heirs satisfy the tastes of America that Luby's became the country's largest cafeteria chain, creating more millionaires per capita among its employees than any other corporation of its size. Even more surprising, the company stayed true to Harry Luby's vision for eight decades, making money by treating its customers and employees exceptionally well. Written with the sweep and drama of a novel, House of Plenty tells the engrossing story of Luby's founding and phenomenal growth, its long run as America's favorite family restaurant during the post-World War II decades, its financial failure during the greed-driven 1990s when non-family leadership jettisoned the company's proven business model, and its recent struggle back to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider stories and company records to recapture the forces that propelled the company to its greatest heights, including its unprecedented practices of allowing store managers to keep 40 percent of net profits and issuing stock to all employees, which allowed thousands of Luby's workers to achieve the American dream of honestly earned prosperity. The authors also plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, including a hushed-up theft that split the family for decades; the 1991 mass shooting at the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's good name across headlines nationwide; and the rapacious over-expansion that more than doubled the company's size in nine years (1987-1996), pushed it into bankruptcy, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide. Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there are no second acts in American lives," House of Plenty tells the epic story of an iconic American institution that has risen, fallen, and found redemption—with no curtain call in sight.]]> 288 Carol Dawson 0292706561 Eliz 0 to-read 3.43 2006 House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby's Cafeterias
author: Carol Dawson
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Have You Seen Luis Velez? 42632584 An Amazon Charts and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde brings heartwarming authenticity to the story of two strangers who find that kindness is a powerful antidote to fear.

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. Not with his mother’s new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father’s wife. Not at school, where he’s an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious Have you seen Luis Velez?

Mildred Gutermann, a German Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, has been alone since her caretaker disappeared. She turns to Raymond for help, and as he tries to track Luis down, a deep and unexpected friendship blossoms between the two.

Despondent at the loss of Luis, Mildred isolates herself further from a neighborhood devolving into bigotry and fear. Determined not to let her give up, Raymond helps her see that for every terrible act the world delivers, there is a mirror image of deep kindness, and Mildred helps Raymond see that there’s hope if you have someone to hold on to.]]> 315 Catherine Ryan Hyde 1542042356 Eliz 0 to-read 4.39 2019 Have You Seen Luis Velez?
author: Catherine Ryan Hyde
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Still Life 57001545
As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parrot -- a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics -- he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.

With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a richly drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.]]> 464 Sarah Winman 0593330757 Eliz 0 to-read 4.08 2021 Still Life
author: Sarah Winman
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> The Reading List 55276648 An unforgettable and heartwarming debut about how a chance encounter with a list of library books helps forge an unlikely friendship between two very different people in a London suburb.

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Ealing after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries.

Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a little bored with her slow job at the checkout desk, she impulsively decides to read every book on the list, one after the other. As each story gives up its magic, the books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home.

When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list� hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too. Slowly, the shared books create a connection between two lonely souls, as fiction helps them escape their grief and everyday troubles and find joy again.]]> 368 Sara Nisha Adams 0063025280 Eliz 0 to-read 4.02 2021 The Reading List
author: Sara Nisha Adams
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Eliz 0 to-read 3.85 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Grass in Piccadilly 6869185
Their tenants come in all shapes and sizes � from pregnant couple Jack and Jenny to German migrants Paula and Heinrich � and they provide a constant stream of both entertainment and anxiety. But it’s Charlotte’s stepdaughter Penny, a disillusioned young women born into the uneasy interwar world, who proves to be the most difficult and scandalous tenant . . .

Flashing between the lives of each tenant Carnegie Medal winning author Noel Streatfeild gives us a kaleidoscopic view of post-war London in her ingenious novel, Grass in Piccadilly. For fans of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington.]]> Noel Streatfeild Eliz 0 to-read 3.38 1952 Grass in Piccadilly
author: Noel Streatfeild
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> Sara Berman's Closet 36260438 128 Maira Kalman 006284640X Eliz 0 to-read 4.53 Sara Berman's Closet
author: Maira Kalman
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> The Wren, the Wren 77265006 An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet� with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.� In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.]]> 278 Anne Enright 1324005696 Eliz 0 to-read 3.51 2023 The Wren, the Wren
author: Anne Enright
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> The Bodyguard 58724801 Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with her bare hands. But the truth is, she's an elite bodyguard and she's just been hired to protect a superstar actor from his stalker.

Jack Stapleton's a Hollywood heartthrob - captured by paparazzi on beaches the world over, rising out of the waves in clingy board shorts and glistening like a Roman deity.

When Jack's mom gets sick, he comes home to the family's Texas ranch to help out. Only one catch: He doesn't want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah - against her will and her better judgment - finds herself pretending to be Jack's girlfriend as a cover.

Protecting Jack should be easy. But protecting her own heart? That's the hardest thing she's ever done...]]> 302 Katherine Center 1250219396 Eliz 0 3.94 2022 The Bodyguard
author: Katherine Center
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
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Pure pleasure! Listened to the audiobook and found myself laughing in parts. A very enjoyable book.
]]> The Light Pirate 60468332
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time� The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.]]> 336 Lily Brooks-Dalton 1538708272 Eliz 0 4.01 2022 The Light Pirate
author: Lily Brooks-Dalton
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/12/01
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I read the final section before the middle 2 chapters, to see if I could bear to finish it. Reminded me of The Parable of the Sower only with hurricanes and water. Haunting, especially reading it right after the hurricane that destroyed so much of North Carolina.
]]> What Does It Feel Like? 214312329
“What Does It Feel Like? is fiction, but it is my most autobiographical work to date. Eve’s story is my story.”—Sophie Kinsella

Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain.

As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again—and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children—she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights, and always buying that dress when she sees it.

Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief. This short, extraordinary novel is a celebration of life, shot through with warmth and humor—it will both break your heart and put it back together again.

“Why did I write such a personal book? I have always processed my life through writing. Hiding behind my fictional characters, I have always turned my own life into a narrative. It is my version of therapy, maybe. Writing is my happy place, and writing this book, although tough going at times, was immensely satisfying and therapeutic for me.”—Sophie Kinsella]]> 144 Sophie Kinsella 0593977564 Eliz 0 4.26 2024 What Does It Feel Like?
author: Sophie Kinsella
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:
A quick read - a novella about the author’s (fictionalized) experience with brain cancer, surgery, and recovery. Wow! Our bodies and brains are remarkable.
]]> The Great Divide 181110028
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 321 Cristina Henríquez 0063291320 Eliz 0 3.62 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina Henríquez
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
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Took several tries because I’m staying away from books with too much tension. Read and listened. Glad to have learned a bit about Panama.
]]> The Lies We Leave Behind 204906169
Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is conflicted when an injury results in her reassignment to the relative comfort of the English countryside.

Love has never been part of her plan, but despite herself, she falls for an officer with three bullet wounds, startling blue eyes and a wicked sense of humor. For the first time, Kate sees a future far from the horrors of war and hate. But before she can pursue it, a secret from her past calls her to duty, and she'll have to travel back into danger one more time to rescue a part of herself she'd left behind. But will she make it back? And will that future still be waiting for her if she does?]]> 416 Noelle Salazar 0778369617 Eliz 0 to-read 4.33 2024 The Lies We Leave Behind
author: Noelle Salazar
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> I've Tried Being Nice: Essays 199798580 New York Times bestselling author Ann Leary offers a literary feast of humor and wisdom told from the perspective of a recovering people pleaser.

Having arrived at a certain age (her prime), Ann Leary casts a wry backward glance at a life spent trying—and often failing—to be nice. With wit and surprising candor, Leary recounts the bedlam of home bat invasions, an obsession with online personality tests, and the mortification of taking ballroom dance lessons with her actor husband. She describes hilarious red-carpet fiascos and other observations from the sidelines of fame, while also touching upon her more poignant struggles with alcoholism, her love for her family, her dogs, and so much more.

Prepare to laugh, cry, cringe and revel in the comically relatable chaos of Ann Leary’s life as revealed in this delighful collection of essays.]]> 240 Ann Leary 1982120347 Eliz 0 to-read 3.77 2024 I've Tried Being Nice: Essays
author: Ann Leary
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> Ready or Not 154462768
Eve Hatch is pretty content with her life. Her apartment in Brooklyn is cozy and close to her childhood best friend Willa, but far from her midwestern, traditional family who never really understood her. While her job is only dream- adjacent , she’s hoping her passion and hard work will soon help her land a more glamorous role. And sure, her most recent romantic history has consisted of not one but two disappointing men named Derek. At least she always knows what to expect…until she finds herself expecting after an uncharacteristic one-night stand.

The unplanned pregnancy cracks open all the relationships in her life. Eve's loyalfriendship with Willa is feeling off , right when she needs her most. And it’s Willa’s steadfast older brother, Shep, who steps up to help. He has always been friendly, but now he’s checking in, ordering her surprise lunches, listening to all her complaints, and is� suddenly kinda hot? Then there’s the baby's father, who is supportive but conflicted. Before long, Eve is rethinking everything she thought she knew about herself and her world.

Over the course of nine months, as Eve struggles to figure out the next right step in her expanding reality, she begins to realize that family and love, in all forms, can sneak up on you when you least expect it.]]> 400 Cara Bastone 0593595718 Eliz 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Ready or Not
author: Cara Bastone
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> Connie: A Memoir 206119058 In an industry dominated by white men, Connie Chung stood alone, the first and only Asian woman to break into the television news industry. This is her extraordinary story, told with incisive wit and remarkable candor. Connie Chung is a pioneer.In 1969 at the age of 23, this once-shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter began working at CBS news as a correspondent.Profoundly influenced by her family’s cultural traditions,yet growing up completely Americanized in the United States, Chung describes her career as an Asian woman in a white male-centered world.Overt sexism was a way of life,but Chung was tenacious in her pursuit of stories � battling rival reporters to secure scoops that ranged from interviewing Magic Johnson to covering the Watergate scandal � and quickly becamea household name. She made history when she achieved her dream of being the first woman to co-anchor theCBS Evening Newsand the first Asianto anchor any news program in the U.S. Chung pulls no punches as she provides a behind-the-scenestour ofher singular life. Fromshowdowns withpowerful men in and out of the newsroom to the stories behind some of her career-defining reporting and the unwavering support of her husband, Maury Povich, nothing is off-limits � good, bad, or ugly. So be sure to tune in for an irreverent and inspiring this is CONNIE like you’ve never seen her before.]]> 336 Connie Chung 1538766981 Eliz 0 4.11 2024 Connie: A Memoir
author: Connie Chung
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/27
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Listened to the audiobook. So much detail! A very thorough summary of her career and challenges. I lost track of her parents somewhere in there. I’m sorry to say it, but slightly boring, especially the second half.
]]> <![CDATA[Zami: A New Spelling of My Name]]> 395220
“Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs

“Among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character.”—The New York Times]]> 256 Audre Lorde Eliz 0 Glad to have read this. 4.39 1982 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
author: Audre Lorde
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
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Glad to have read this.
]]> <![CDATA[American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era]]> 207003668 From an award-winning journalist comes a vivid and moving portrait of eight trans and nonbinary teenagers across the country, following their daily triumphs, struggles, and all that encompasses growing up trans in America today

“A master class in journalism as a force for change. Nico Lang cuts through the political ping-pong over transgender rights to surface the human stories that too often go ignored. Lang’s lucid and clear-eyed account of their lives offers an essential corrective, reminding us that there’s nothing more American than the freedom to be yourself.”�—SAMANTHA ALLEN, author ofReal Queer America

“Lang weaves this broad bleak terrain with warm insights and a clear immediacy of message. Expansive and compassionate.� �GABE DUNN,New York Timesbestselling author ofI Hate Everyone But You

Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but whatisincredibly rare are the voices of the people at the heart of this transgender and gender nonconforming kids themselves. For their groundbreaking new book, journalist Nico Lang spent a year traveling the country to document the lives of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid teens and their families. Drawing on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground interviews with them and the people in their communities,American Teenagerpaints a vivid portrait of what it’s actually like to grow up trans today.

From the tip of Florida’s conservative panhandle to vibrant queer communities in California, and from Texas churches to mosques in Illinois,American Teenagergives readers a window into the lives of Wyatt, Rhydian, Mykah, Clint, Ruby, Augie, Jack, and Kylie, eight teens who, despite what some lawmakers might want us to believe, are truly just kids looking for a brighter future.]]> 288 Nico Lang 1419773828 Eliz 0 to-read 4.49 American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era
author: Nico Lang
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.49
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Eliz 0 to-read 4.12 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> Manhattan Transfer 126587 Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike. From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it.

More than seventy-five years after its first publication, Manhattan Transfer still stands as "a novel of the very first importance" (Sinclair Lewis). It is a masterpiece of modern fiction and a lasting tribute to the dual-edged nature of the American dream.]]> 342 John Dos Passos 0618381864 Eliz 0 to-read 3.67 1925 Manhattan Transfer
author: John Dos Passos
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> Eleanore of Avignon 203956661 Eleanore of Avignon is the story of a woman who is unwilling to bend to the limitations her society places upon her when she becomes the unlikely apprentice to the pope’s physician at the most challenging and dangerous moment in medieval European history.

Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a midwife and budding herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she knows all too well from her late mother’s fate, she must be careful to stay within her station. So, she quietly accepts her role tending to the pregnant women in her home city of Avignon; spending time with her father and beloved twin sister, Margot; and escaping to the surrounding woods to forage for herbs when she can. At the very least, she is determined to preserve the little freedom she does have by staying unwed—unlike Margot, who is about to marry a man with painful connections to their mother’s death.

Then, in a chance encounter, Elea meets Guy de Chauliac, “Guigo,� the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, who, against all odds, agrees to take her on as his apprentice. Under his tutelage, a whole new world opens to Elea—a world of status, wealth, and fascinating medical cases—but just as she starts to settle into her new position, the much-feared plague hits Europe, making Elea and Guigo's work more urgent than ever. And as if that weren’t enough, the disgraced Queen Joanna of Naples arrives in Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder—and she is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.

As the Black Death spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake—and as the queen's childbirth approaches—Elea finds herself battling what seems to be an unwinnable war. All the while, the people of Avignon are becoming more and more desperate for a scapegoat, and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost her everything.]]> 320 Elizabeth DeLozier 0593475038 Eliz 0 to-read 4.29 2024 Eleanore of Avignon
author: Elizabeth DeLozier
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> I Might Be in Trouble 210331628 A suspenseful, satirical dark comedy about a struggling writer who wakes up to find his date from the night before dead—and must then decide how far he’s willing to go to spin the misadventure into his next big book.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

The issue is, good ideas are hard to come by, and the mounting pressure of a near-empty bank account isn’t helping. But when David connects with a sexy stranger on a dating app, he figures a wild night out in New York City may be just what he needs to find inspiration. Lucky for him, his date turns out to be handsome, confident, and wealthy, not to mention the perfect distraction from yet another evening staring at a blank screen.

After one of the best nights of his life, David wakes up hungover but giddy—only to find prince charming dead next to him in bed. Horrified, completely confused, and suddenly faced with the implausible-but-somehow-plausible idea that he may have actually killed his date, David calls the only person he can trust in a moment of crisis: his literary agent, Stacey.

Together, David and Stacey must untangle the events of the previous night, cover their tracks, and spin the entire misadventure into David’s career-defining novel—if only they can figure out what to do with the body first.]]> 329 Daniel Aleman 1538766345 Eliz 0 to-read 3.61 2024 I Might Be in Trouble
author: Daniel Aleman
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka]]> 200837962
After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women's agency in the Second World War.]]> 224 Clare Mulley 1399601067 Eliz 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka
author: Clare Mulley
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> Something Close to Nothing 205307211
Winston Kang and Jared Cahill are traveling to Cambodia to meet the surrogate of their baby girl and witness her birth. The egg donor is Korean American, just like Wynn, and Jared, who is white, can’t wait to meet his daughter and raise their beautiful, hip family. Named after Jared’s favorite star (more Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice, less Mamma Mia and Devil Wears Prada), Meryl will be a cool Bay Area kid. She will eat organic baby food, learn French, and attend Wellesley, Williams, or Wesleyan. But when Wynn bails on Jared and Meryl at the last minute to pursue his dream of becoming a hip-hop dancer, the master plan begins to crumble. Jared starts to panic that no one in his life can talk to Meryl about her period or what it’s like to grow up as an Asian American person. Oceans away, Wynn is figuring out what it means to put himself first—auditioning for Misty Espinoza’s comeback tour, organizing a Prince-themed flash mob, and reconnecting with his old friend, Nicole, in Nairobi, where they try to make sense of their weird but mostly single lives.

Everything’s amazing, right?

Told in alternating points of view, Wynn and Jared explore the dark side of the very American idea of following one’s dreams, whether it be pursuing a career in dance or having a biological child as a gay man, a la Andy Cohen, and Anderson Cooper. Along their messy tragi-comic journey, unresolved issues of race, identity, and privilege haunt them, pulling at the loose threads of their fantasies and raising the question of whether they will ultimately face themselves and grow up.

Written by the gifted and humorous Tom Pyun, Something Close to Nothing is a sardonic and addictive page-turner inspired by the author’s personal experience building a non-traditional LGBTQ family.]]> 250 Tom Pyun 1612942997 Eliz 0 to-read 3.93 Something Close to Nothing
author: Tom Pyun
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> <![CDATA[You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty]]> 59232998
Feyi Adekola wants to learn how to be alive again.

It’s been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she’s almost a new person now—an artist with her own studio, and sharing a brownstone apartment with her ride-or-die best friend, Joy, who insists it’s time for Feyi to ease back into the dating scene. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury trip to a tropical island, decadent meals in the glamorous home of a celebrity chef, and a major curator who wants to launch her art career.

She’s even started dating the perfect guy, but their new relationship might be sabotaged before it has a chance by the dangerous thrill Feyi feels every time she locks eyes with the one person in the house who is most definitely off-limits. This new life she asked for just got a lot more complicated, and Feyi must begin her search for real answers. Who is she ready to become? Can she release her past and honor her grief while still embracing her future? And, of course, there’s the biggest question of all—how far is she willing to go for a second chance at love?

Akwaeke Emezi’s vivid and passionate writing takes us deep into a world of possibility and healing, and the constant bravery of choosing love against all odds.]]> 288 Akwaeke Emezi 1982188707 Eliz 0 3.52 2022 You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/15
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Stayed up too late reading this - my form of retreat. Going for your dreams in career and love - risky business!
]]> The Divorce Party 60285635
On their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Gwyn Huntington and her husband, Thomas, invite friends and family over for a most unusual celebration. Their home, Huntington Hall, has been in the family for generations after surviving the Great Hurricane of 1938, which tore Montauk apart. Instead of celebrating their life there, Gwyn and Thomas are toasting their divorce.

The weekend also marks the first time that their son, Nate, brings his fiance, Maggie, home to Montauk. But Maggie finds herself wondering if it will be the last, because she discovers a secret Nate has kept for years.

A multigenerational novel about love, family, and what it means to build a life with someone, The Divorce Party brings us two immensely appealing women: Gwyn, at the end of her marriage, and her future daughter-in-law, Maggie, at the beginning. Though they make very different choices, both women ultimately discover how to create the lives that they most want to lead.]]> 256 Laura Dave 0670018597 Eliz 0 3.44 2007 The Divorce Party
author: Laura Dave
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
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Listened to the audiobook, read with breathy, dramatic flair by Rebecca Lowman. Enjoyable and unbelievable book, where everyone is beautiful, everyone wants the best for one another, the men are misunderstood and the women are forgiving, and love finds a way.
]]> Happy All the Time 164408 Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.]]> 224 Laurie Colwin 0060955325 Eliz 0 to-read 3.86 1978 Happy All the Time
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen]]> 164397 184 Laurie Colwin 0060955309 Eliz 0 to-read 4.15 1988 Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Candy House 58437521 From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.� Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.]]> 352 Jennifer Egan 1476716765 Eliz 0 to-read 3.62 2022 The Candy House
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are]]> 134117265
Far from being a lifeless ornament in the sky, the Moon holds the key to some of science’s central questions, and in this fascinating account of our remarkable satellite, award-winning science journalist Rebecca Boyle shows us why it is the secret to our success.

The Moon stabilizes the Earth’s tilt toward the Sun, creating reliable seasons. The durability of this tilt over millennia stabilizes our climate. The Moon pulls on the ocean, driving the tides. It was these tides that mixed nutrients in the sea, enabling the evolution of complex life and, ultimately, bringing life onto land.

But the Moon also played a pivotal role in our conceptual development. While the Sun helped humans to mark daily time, hunters and gatherers used the phases of the Moon to count months and years, allowing them to situate themselves in time and plan for the future. Its role in the development of religion—Mesopotamian priests recorded the Moon’s position to make predictions about the Moon god--created the earliest known empirical, scientific observation.

Boyle deftly reframes the history of scientific discovery through a lunar lens, from Mesopotamia to the present day. Touching on ancient astronomers including Claudius Ptolemy; ancient philosophers from Anaxagoras to Plutarch; the scientific revolution of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler; and the lunar fiction of writers like Jules Verne--which inspired Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who succeeded in landing humans on the Moon--Boyle charts our path with the Moon from the origins of human civilization to the Apollo landings and up to the present.

Even as astronauts around the world prepare to return to the Moon, opening up new frontiers of discovery, profit, and politics, Our Moon brings the Moon down to Earth.]]> 336 Rebecca Boyle 0593129725 Eliz 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
author: Rebecca Boyle
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation]]> 55959562 The story of the fascinating, fraught alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Weston Chapman—and of how its break-up led to thesuccess of America's most important social movement

In the crucial early years of the Abolition movement, the Boston branch of the cause seized upon the star power of the eloquent ex-slave Frederick Douglass to make its case for slaves' freedom. Journalist William Lloyd Garrisonpromoted emancipation while Garrison loyalist Maria Weston Chapman, known as the “Contessa,� raised money and managed Douglass� speaking tour from her Boston townhouse.

Conventional histories have seen Douglass� departure for the New York wing of the Abolition party as a result of a rift between Douglass and Garrison. But, as acclaimed historian Linda Hirshman reveals,this completely misses the woman in power. Weston Chapman wrote cutting letters to Douglass, doubting his loyalty; the Bostonian abolitionists were shot through with racist prejudice, even aiming the N-word at Douglass among themselves. Through incisive, original analysis, Hirshman convinces that the inevitablebreak-up was in facta successful failure. Eventually, as the most sought-after Black activist in America, Douglass was able to dangle the prize of his endorsement over the Republican Party’s candidate for President, Abraham Lincoln. Two years later the abolition of slavery—if not the abolition of racism—became immutable law.
]]> 352 Linda R. Hirshman 132890024X Eliz 0 to-read 3.79 2022 The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation
author: Linda R. Hirshman
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/14
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]]> The Storyteller's Secret 36038788 From the bestselling author of Trail of Broken Wings comes an epic story of the unrelenting force of love, the power of healing, and the invincible desire to dream.

Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past.

Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi—her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant—who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation. Through her courageous grandmother’s arrestingly romantic and heart-wrenching story, Jaya discovers the legacy bequeathed to her and a strength that, until now, she never knew was possible.

]]> 401 Sejal Badani 1542097274 Eliz 0 to-read 4.47 2018 The Storyteller's Secret
author: Sejal Badani
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Woman in Me 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Eliz 0 3.83 2023 The Woman in Me
author: Britney Spears
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/10
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I was looking for a listen and this was available. What we put celebrities through is terrible. As are California’s conservancy laws! Not well written, But Glad she got to tell her story.
]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Eliz 5 4.00 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
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My book club has read many by Elizabeth Strout over the last 15 years. This weaving together and concluding of so many stories came at the right time for us.
]]> <![CDATA[Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)]]> 59463840
“Identity politics� is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class� vs. “race.� By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.]]> 157 Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 1642596884 Eliz 0 to-read 3.99 2022 Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
author: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> How to Read a Book 62365896 A charming, deeply moving novel about second chances, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle�

Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.

When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.

How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living. .]]> 288 Monica Wood 0063243679 Eliz 0 to-read 4.21 2024 How to Read a Book
author: Monica Wood
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City]]> 65213876
Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table―eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches , Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect.

Whether it’s heirloom vegetables or a block of neon-yellow government cheese, food is both a basic necessity and a nuanced litmus what and how we eat reflects our communities, our cultures, and our place in the world. The Meth Lunches gives a glimpse into the lives of people living in Foster’s Las Vegas community―the grocery store cashier who feels safer surrounded by food after surviving a childhood of hunger; the inmate baking a birthday cake with coffee creamer and Sprite; the unhoused woman growing scallions in the slice of sunlight on her passenger seat. This is what food looks like in the lives of real people.

The Meth Lunches reveals stories of dysfunction intertwined with hope, of the insurmountable obstacles and fierce determination all playing out on the plates of ordinary Americans. It’s a bold invitation to pull up a chair and reconsider our responsibilities to the most vulnerable among us. Welcome to the table.]]> 320 Kim Foster 1250278775 Eliz 0 to-read 4.14 2023 The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City
author: Kim Foster
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Be Ready When the Luck Happens]]> 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.

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 Eliz 0 to-read 4.26 2024 Be Ready When the Luck Happens
author: Ina Garten
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Autocracy, Inc. 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Eliz 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Autocracy, Inc.
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> Other People's Houses 867698 320 Lore Segal 1565841433 Eliz 0 to-read 3.55 1964 Other People's Houses
author: Lore Segal
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President's Black Family]]> 52772978 "A Rootsfor a new generation, rich in storytelling and steeped in history."
�Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"A compelling saga that gives a voice to those that history tried to erase...Poignant and eye-opening, this is a must-read."
�Booklist

InThe Other Madisons, Bettye Kearse—a descendant of an enslaved cook and, according to oral tradition, President James Madison—shares her family story and explores the issues of legacy, race, and the powerful consequences of telling the whole truth.

For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this traditionBettye Kearse would nothave known that she isa descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen.In 1990, Bettye became the eighth-generation griotte for her family. Their credo—�Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president”—was intended to be a source of pride, but for her, it echoed with abuses of slavery, including rape and incest.

Confronting those abuses, Bettye embarked on a journey of discovery—of herancestors, the nation, and herself. She learned that wherever African slaves walked, recorded history silenced their voices and buried their footsteps: beside a slave-holding fortress in Ghana;below a federal building in New York City; and under a brick walkway atJames Madison’s Virginia plantation. When Bettyetried to confirm the information her ancestorshad passed down, sheencountered obstacles at every turn.

Part personal quest, part testimony, part historical correction,The Other Madisonsis the saga of an extraordinary American family told by agriottein search of the wholestory.]]> 272 Bettye Kearse 132860439X Eliz 0 4.16 2020 The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President's Black Family
author: Bettye Kearse
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
Picked this up on a visit to Montpelier, President James Madison’s plantation and home. Fascinating.
]]> <![CDATA[The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism]]> 1043745 445 Stanley Cloud 0395877539 Eliz 0 to-read 4.27 1996 The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism
author: Stanley Cloud
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/03
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970]]> 721962
In this groundbreaking and absorbing book, credit finally goes where credit is due � to the bold women who were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, Lynne Olson skillfully tells the long-overlooked story of the extraordinary women who were among the most fearless, resourceful, and tenacious leaders of the civil rights movement.

Freedom's Daughters includes portraits of more than sixty women � many until now forgotten and some never before written about � from key figures like Ida B. Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Baker, and Septima Clark to some of the smaller players who represent the hundreds of women who each came forth to do her own small part and who together ultimately formed the mass movements that made the difference. Freedom's Daughters puts a human face on the civil rights struggle � and shows that that face was often female.]]> 464 Lynne Olson 0684850133 Eliz 0 to-read 4.35 2001 Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
author: Lynne Olson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction]]> 61239984
Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.�

Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.]]> 448 Lynne Olson 052550947X Eliz 0 4.16 2023 Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction
author: Lynne Olson
name: Eliz
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
Listened to the audiobook - I might have appreciated it more if I had read it. Many many dates and names and locations, all necessary for a complete account, but it was hard time hold on to the story. I’m not particularly interested in Egypt; picked this up for a book club. At this present moment, interesting reflections on colonialism, Gaza, Israel, and world politics in the 1950s.
]]> Kiss Me at Christmas 204466320 White Christmas meets Nora Ephron in Jenny Bayliss� latest wholehearted, ensemble-cast holiday extravaganza.

Christmas can officially get stuffed because Harriet Smith is not feeling bright and merry this year. She hasn’t for a while. So when her college-aged daughter opts for Manhattan’s winter wonderland instead of Christmas at home, Harriet finds herself seeking solace in a wine-soaked one-night stand.

But how Harriet will spend the holidays is swiftly decided for her after she takes the fall for some students who break into the town’s old Winter Theater. To get the students off the hook, the theater’s elderly owner requests that Harriet direct the washed-out stage’s final Christmas performance. And Harriet will do anything to help the kids . . . even work with the owner’s lawyer who, as it turns out, is her less than impressed one-night stand.

Directing the play with him won't exactly change her life. But it might just reignite the Christmas spirit andremind her what makes life merry and bright again.]]> 397 Jenny Bayliss 0593717910 Eliz 0 to-read 3.58 2024 Kiss Me at Christmas
author: Jenny Bayliss
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> A December to Remember 75670216 Three bickering half sisters. One unique antiques shop. The coziest holiday season of their lives.

Wildly different half sisters Maggie, Simone, and Star have hardly seen one another since their sprightly summers at Rowan Thorp, their eccentric father Augustus’s home. Known for his bustling approach to the knick-knack shop he ran, Augustus was loved by all and known by none, not even his daughters.

Now, years later, the three estranged women are called upon for the reading of Augustus’s will and quickly realize he's orchestrated a series of hoops through which they must jump to unlock their inheritance—the last thing any of them want to do. But Maggie and Star desperately need the money. And who would Simone be to resist?

Through hilarious goose chases, small-town mishaps, and one heart-warming winter solstice celebration, love, hope, and reconcilation is in the air, if only the three sisters can let themselves grasp it.]]> 413 Jenny Bayliss 0593422244 Eliz 0 to-read 3.68 2023 A December to Remember
author: Jenny Bayliss
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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review:

]]> A Season for Second Chances 57345678 A charmingly quirky seaside town offers a recently separated restauranteur a fresh start and possibly a new lease on love in A Season for Second Chances, by the author of The Twelve Dates of Christmas.

Annie Sharpe's spark for life has fizzled out. Her kids are grown up, her restaurant is doing just fine on its own, and her twenty-six-year marriage has come to an unceremonious end. Untethered for the first time in her adult life, she finds a winter guardian position in a historic seaside home and decides to leave her city life behind for a brand-new beginning.

When she arrives in Willow Bay, Annie is enamored by the charming house, the invigorating sea breeze, and the town's rich seasonal traditions. Not to mention, her neighbors receive her with open arms--that is, all except the surly nephew of the homeowner, whose grand plans for the property are at odds with her residency. As Christmas approaches, tensions and tides rise in Willow Bay, and Annie's future seems less and less certain. But with a little can-do spirit and holiday magic, the most difficult time of her life will become...a season for second chances.]]> 448 Jenny Bayliss 0593085418 Eliz 0 to-read 3.76 A Season for Second Chances
author: Jenny Bayliss
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> Meet Me Under the Mistletoe 61486279 A city bookshop owner heads to the English countryside for a holiday reunion—only to face her childhood enemy.

Elinor Noel—Nory for short—is quite content running her secondhand bookshop in London. Forever torn between her working-class upbringing and her classmates� extravagant lifestyles at the posh private school she attended on scholarship, Nory has finally figured out how to keep both at equal distance. So when two of her oldest friends invite their whole gang to spend the time leading up to their wedding together at the castle near their old school, Nory must prepare herself for an emotionally complicated few days.

The reunion brings back fond memories, but also requires Nory to dodge an ill-advised former fling. When she falls quite literally into the arms of Isaac, the castle’s head gardener, who has nothing but contempt for the "snobby prep school kids," the attraction between them is undeniable. And as Nory spends more time with Isaac during the wedding festivities, she finds herself falling hard for the boy she used to consider an enemy. Nory and Isaac explore their common ground, but pressures mount on all sides, and Nory must decide what kind of life she wants to live and what sort of love is worth the risk...]]> 429 Jenny Bayliss 0593422236 Eliz 0 to-read 3.47 2022 Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
author: Jenny Bayliss
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Twelve Dates of Christmas 50608051 'Tis the season for finding romance in this hilarious and uplifting holiday read

When it comes to relationships, thirty-four-year-old Kate Turner is ready to say "Bah, humbug." The sleepy town of Blexford, England, isn't exactly brimming with prospects, and anyway, Kate's found fulfillment in her career as a designer, and in her delicious side job baking for her old friend Matt's neighborhood café. But then her best friend signs her up for a dating agency that promises to help singles find love before the holidays. Twenty-three days until Christmas. Twelve dates with twelve different men. The odds must finally be in her favor . . . right?

Yet with each new date more disastrous than the one before--and the whole town keeping tabs on her misadventures--Kate must remind herself that sometimes love, like mistletoe, shows up where it's least expected. And maybe, just maybe, it's been right under her nose all along. . . .]]> 320 Jenny Bayliss Eliz 0 to-read 3.54 2020 The Twelve Dates of Christmas
author: Jenny Bayliss
name: Eliz
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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review:

]]>