en-US Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:22:32 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born �� a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam �� and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Greg 0 currently-reading 4.05 2019
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Greg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 338713 Book by Maugham, W Somerset 233 W. Somerset Maugham 0099289008 Greg 3 3.55 1908
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Greg
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1908
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> 17456530 96 Toyohiko Kagawa 1122239815 Greg 2 shine-shadow2025 3.68 1935
author: Toyohiko Kagawa
name: Greg
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1935
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: shine-shadow2025
review:

]]> 35066358 417 Claire North Greg 3 shine-shadow2025 4.03 2014
author: Claire North
name: Greg
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 50202953
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 272 Susanna Clarke 163557563X Greg 4 shine-shadow2025 4.22 2020
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Greg
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
review:

]]> 89231 Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs.

A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.]]> 336 John Williams 1400076730 Greg 5 shine-shadow2025 4.23 1972
author: John Williams
name: Greg
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 61686012 “Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.��

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 192 Han Kang 0593595270 Greg 4 shine-shadow2025 3.54 2011
author: Han Kang
name: Greg
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 178565 Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,�� the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.]]> 256 Barbara Pym 014310487X Greg 4 shine-shadow2025 3.92 1952
author: Barbara Pym
name: Greg
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 195607710 The house breathes.

The house contains bodies and secrets.

The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.

It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.

They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.]]> 124 Layla Martínez Greg 4 shine-shadow2025 3.86 2021
author: Layla Martínez
name: Greg
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: shine-shadow2025
review:

]]> 207294297 At a time when society is more fractured than ever before, beloved Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle invites us to see the world through a new lens of connection and build the loving community that we long to live in—a perfect message for readers of Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver, and Richard Rohr. Over the past thirty years, Father Gregory Boyle has transformed thousands of lives through his work as the founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world. The program runs on two unwavering (1) Everyone is unshakably good (no exceptions) and (2) we belong to each other (no exceptions). Boyle believes that these two ideas allow all of us to cultivate a new way of seeing. Every community wants to be a safe place, where people are seen, and then are cherished. By remembering that we belong to each other, we find our way out of chaos and its dispiriting tribalism. Pooka, a former gang member who now oversees the program’s housing division, puts it “Here, love is our lens. It’s how we see things.�� In Cherished Belonging, Boyle calls back to Christianity’s origins as a subversive spiritual movement of equality, emancipation, and peace. Early Christianity was a way of life—not a set of beliefs. Boyle’s vision of community isn’t just a space for an individual to heal, but for people to join together and heal each other in a new collective living, a world dedicated to kindness as a constant and radical act of defiance. “The answer to every question is, indeed, compassion,�� Boyle exhorts. He calls us to cherish and nurture the connections that are all around us and live with radical kindness.]]> 224 Gregory Boyle 1668061856 Greg 0 currently-reading 4.45
author: Gregory Boyle
name: Greg
average rating: 4.45
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 44066606 55 Agatha Christie 9897788093 Greg 4 4.01
author: Agatha Christie
name: Greg
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/09
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
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]]> 34776861 A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem.

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl�� with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction—all crystallized in prose as glittering as the piling snow.

Acclaimed upon its publication as one of the best science fiction books of the year, Kavan’s 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Miéville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics.]]> 193 Anna Kavan Greg 0 currently-reading 3.71 1967
author: Anna Kavan
name: Greg
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 1056805 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.

The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Boroff, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, one of England's leading poets, has produced an inventive translation of this Arthurian epic that resounds with both clarity and verve. As England's Sunday Telegraph wrote, "Armitage's animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf." His work, presented here with facing original text and a note on the text by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original - but responds equally to its own powerfully persuasive ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes - acoustic, physical, and metaphorical -in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true and long-awaited translator.]]> 198 Simon Armitage 0393060489 Greg 4 3.98 1375
author: Simon Armitage
name: Greg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1375
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/27
date added: 2025/02/17
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]]> 51541496
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.]]> 227 Raven Leilani 0374194327 Greg 4 shine-shadow2025 3.51 2020
author: Raven Leilani
name: Greg
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 3027439 Głównym bohaterem jest Redlaw, samotny i zgorzkniały profesor chemii, który zmaga się z bolesnymi wspomnieniami z przeszłości. Pewnej nocy odwiedza go duch, oferując mu niezwykły dar �� możliwość zapomnienia wszystkich cierpień i krzywd, jakie kiedykolwiek przeżył. Redlaw przyjmuje propozycję, ale szybko odkrywa, że brak pamięci o bólu prowadzi do odrzucenia także współczucia i empatii.
Opowieść rozwija się, gdy wpływ klątwy zaczyna oddziaływać również na innych ludzi w jego otoczeniu, od jego służących po biednych mieszkańców miasta. Tylko skromna i życzliwa Milly Swidger, będąca uosobieniem dobroci i ciepła, zdaje się pozostawać nietknięta przez tę emocjonalną pustkę. To właśnie dzięki niej Redlaw zaczyna rozumieć, że zarówno radość, jak i cierpienie są nieodłącznymi elementami ludzkiego doświadczenia.
Urzeczony to głęboko poruszająca opowieść, która bada istotę pamięci i emocji jako kluczowych składników naszej tożsamości. Choć mniej znana niż Opowieść wigilijna, książka zachwyca mistrzowskim stylem Dickensa i skłania do refleksji nad rolą przeszłości w kształtowaniu naszej przyszłości. To melancholijna, ale ostatecznie pełna nadziei historia, która przypomina, że ludzkie serce potrzebuje zarówno światła, jak i cienia.]]> 101 Charles Dickens 1576467333 Greg 3 shine-shadow2025 3.31 1848
author: Charles Dickens
name: Greg
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1848
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in��Görbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Greg 5 shine-shadow2025 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Greg
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 1993567 130 Roberto Bolaño 0099459396 Greg 0 to-read 3.76 2000
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Greg
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 129263635
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival

Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1609809483 Greg 5 shine-shadow2025 4.36 2000
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Greg
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: shine-shadow2025
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]]> 202468422 From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time.

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.��]]> 464 Elif Shafak 0593801717 Greg 0 currently-reading 4.39 2024
author: Elif Shafak
name: Greg
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 49348414 “The mill owner's wife persists: 'A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That's my last offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one.' In answer, my friend gently reflects: 'I doubt it. There's never two of anything.��

'A Christmas Memory' is a short story written by Truman Capote, first published in 1956. This much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic.

Seven-year-old Buddy knows that the Christmas season has arrived when his cousin, Miss Sook Falk exclaims: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd, but enduring, friendship between two innocent souls—one young and one old—and the memories they share of beloved holiday rituals.

Truman Capote (1924��1984) was an American writer whose non-fiction, stories, novels, and plays are recognized literary classics. His first novel, 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' (1948) stayed on the bestseller list for nine weeks. In the 1950s and 1960s, Capote remained prolific producing both fiction and non-fiction, such as the novella 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1958). His masterpiece, 'In Cold Blood' (1965), became a worldwide success, after which he published rarely and suffered from alcohol addiction. He died in 1984 at age 59. At least 20 films and TV dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.]]> 122 Truman Capote Greg 5 4.19 1956
author: Truman Capote
name: Greg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> 61150781 Squid Game meets The Left Hand of Darkness meets Under the Skin in this radical literary sensation from South Korea about an alien's hunt for food that transforms into an existential crisis about what it means to be human.

After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth's gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food? As they discover, humans are delicious.

Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shift their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey's sexual preference, then attack at the pivotal moment of their encounter. They use a variety of hunting tools, including a popular dating app, to target the juiciest prey and carry a backpack filled with torturous instruments and cleaning equipment. But the alien's existence begins to unravel one night when they fail to kill their latest meal.

Thrust into an ill-fated chase across the city, the alien is confronted with the psychological and physical tolls their experience on Earth has taken. Questioning what they must do to sustain their own survival, they begin to understand why humans also fight to live. But their hunger is insatiable, and the alien once again targets a new prey, not knowing what awaits. . . .

Dolki Min's haunting debut novel is part psychological thriller, part searing critique of the social structures that marginalize those who are different--the disabled, queer, and nonconformist. Walking Practice uncovers humanity in who we consider to be alien, and illuminates how alienation can shape the human experience.

Walking Practice features 21 black-and-white line drawings throughout.

Translated from the Korean by Victoria Caudle]]> 166 Dolki Min 0063258617 Greg 3 3.61 2022
author: Dolki Min
name: Greg
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 23513349 Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

It is split into four chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different pain. Healing a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them -- because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.]]> 204 Rupi Kaur 1502784270 Greg 3 3.97 2014
author: Rupi Kaur
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
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]]> 75665931 From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times�� Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.]]> 368 Benjamín Labatut 0593654471 Greg 4 4.33 2023
author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Greg
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
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]]> 195790870 From Chuck Tingle, author of the USA Today bestselling Camp Damascus, comes a new heart-pounding story about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.

Misha is a jaded scriptwriter who has been working in Hollywood for years, and has just been nominated for his first Oscar. But when he's pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale��"for the algorithm"―Misha discovers that it's not that simple.

As he is haunted by his past, and past mistakes, Misha must risk everything to find a way to do what's right―before it's too late.]]> 295 Chuck Tingle 1250874653 Greg 3 4.14 2024
author: Chuck Tingle
name: Greg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
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]]> 62854842 In this spellbinding debut novel, two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection--a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power.

For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements--books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.

All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna's isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they'll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .]]> 416 Emma Törzs 0063253461 Greg 4 3.99 2023
author: Emma Törzs
name: Greg
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
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]]> 3808644
But they may never make it to Thompson Hall. The story opens in Paris at Le Grand Hotel, where Mr. Brown is down with "a throat-condition" - he is unable to travel to England. Only Mrs. Brown is quite determinded they will go on.

So begins a Christmas tale complicated and simple, pathetic and farcical, embarrassing, - even risque, though of course it could be read aloud to an assembled Victorian family.

--from the book jacket]]> 82 Anthony Trollope 0932282075 Greg 3 3.66 1861
author: Anthony Trollope
name: Greg
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1861
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves:
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]]> 365522 In this brilliantly satisfying conclusion to the epic adventure begun in Split Infinity and continued in Blue Adept, Piers Anthony again proves himself a consummate master of both science fiction and fantasy.

Stile had problems--two whole worlds of problems, in fact.

On Proton, a world of future science, his murder was averted only by the help of a lovely robot, who sent him through an invisible "curtain" to Phaze, an alternate world ruled by magic. There he found he was the double of the sorcerer, the Blue Adept, who had been mysteriously murdered. And the assassin was after Stile!

To survive, Stile had to master magic, fight a dragon, win the friendship of a lady unicorn, locate his enemy among the paranoid Adepts, and return out of Phaze to win the Great Games on Proton. After that, he was ready to face the real problems!

The infallible Oracle was suddenly involved in the conspiracy against him. The two worlds were out of balance and heading for disaster. Stile was somehow supposed to take over the job of saving them or go down to total destruction with all he loved, he had to act and act quickly--with no idea of what he was supposed to do.]]> 368 Piers Anthony 0345349342 Greg 3 3.93 1982
author: Piers Anthony
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 62109191
Follow Wenqi, Liam, and Mrs. in this modern gothic ghost story by Chinese-Canadian writer and immigrant, Ai Jiang. LINGHUN is set in the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the dead live again as spirits, conjured by the grief-sick population that refuses to let go.]]> 178 Ai Jiang Greg 3 3.91 2023
author: Ai Jiang
name: Greg
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> 3040043 Denevi se había hecho famoso en Argentina con dos una magistral novela detectivesca, Rosaura a las diez (mal traducida al inglés como Rose at Ten O'Clock), y una nouvelle, Ceremonia secreta, que ganó el premio de la revista Life al mejor relato breve latinoamericano de 1960 -y que un Joseph Losey desquiciado tergiversó absolutamente en su espantosa película del mismo nombre.]]> 36 Marco Denevi 8493403865 Greg 4 3.90 1966
author: Marco Denevi
name: Greg
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> 200101541 A chilling twist on the “cursed film�� genre from the bestselling author of��The Pallbearers Club ���Ի���The Cabin at the End of the World.

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part?��Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played “The Thin Kid�� is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions �� demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?��

Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful twist on the “cursed film�� that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.]]> 277 Paul Tremblay 0063070014 Greg 0 to-read 3.31 2024
author: Paul Tremblay
name: Greg
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Greg 4 3.62 2024
author: Cristina Henríquez
name: Greg
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> 617237 160 Michael Moorcock 0425090426 Greg 3 3.89 1973
author: Michael Moorcock
name: Greg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1973
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 17688 The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories has garnered critical acclaim and is widely recognized as the preeminent English-language anthology of Kafka's stories. These translations illuminate one of this century's most controversial writers and have made Kafka's work accessible to a whole new generation. This classic collection of forty-one great short works -- including such timeless pieces of modern fiction as "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" -- now includes two new stories, "First Sorrow" and "The Hunger Artist."]]> 352 Franz Kafka 0684800705 Greg 4 4.09 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Greg
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> 55058814
Full of powerful, physical imagery, this prize-winning debut novel by acclaimed Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language. It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure and solitude, and speaks of the body, of sex, and of the self.]]> 131 Eva Baltasar 191150875X Greg 4 3.95 2018
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Greg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
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]]> 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Greg 4 4.13 2023
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Greg
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> 1644998 147 Michael Moorcock 0425075141 Greg 4 3.83 1973
author: Michael Moorcock
name: Greg
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> 35167717 Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and his pal Tom Sawyer “light out for the Territory�� to avoid “sivilization.�� In Robert Coover’s vision of their Western adventures, Huck and Tom start by joining the famous but short-lived Pony Express. Tom becomes something of a hero and decides he’d rather own civilization than escape it, returning east to get a wife and a law degree. But Huck stays alone in the Territory; he guides wagon trains, scouts for both sides in the war, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a bandit gang, finds an ill-fated pal in an army fort and another in a Lakota Sioux tribe, and eventually finds himself in the Black Hills just ahead of the 1876 Gold Rush. In the course of his adventures, Huck reunites with Tom, Jim, and Becky Thatcher and faces some hard truths and harder choices.]]> 320 Robert Coover 0393355497 Greg 3 3.71 2017
author: Robert Coover
name: Greg
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> 34818440
Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. He worked the desert along the Mexican border, at the remote crossroads of drug routes and smuggling corridors, tracking humans through blistering days and frigid nights across a vast terrain. He hauls in the dead. He detains the exhausted and the parched. He tries not to think where the stories go from there.

Born to the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, the border is in his blood. But the line he is sworn to defend is dissolving. Haunted by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. And when an immigrant friend does not return from a trip to Mexico to visit his dying mother, Cantú faces a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped.

The Line Becomes a River is timely and electrifying. It brings to life this landscape of sprawling borderlands and the countless people who risk their lives to cross it. Yet it takes us beyond one person’s experience to reveal truths about life on either side of any arbitrary line, wherever it is lived.]]> 250 Francisco Cantú Greg 0 to-read 3.93
author: Francisco Cantú
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43567283
A dazzling and provocative debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, putting fierce and fabulous female characters centre stage in brilliantly funny and sharp twists on fairy tale.

Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.

These stories set in the Indonesian everyday �� in corporate boardrooms, shanty towns, on dangdut stages �� reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. This is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave.

Dark, humorous, and vividly realised, Apple and Knife brings together taboos, inversions, sex and death in a heady, intoxicating mix.]]> 187 Intan Paramaditha 1784709794 Greg 3 3.49 2018
author: Intan Paramaditha
name: Greg
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 85463370
Chrysalis is a story about solitude and selfhood, and about the blurred line between self-care and narcissism. It is about controlling the body and the mind, about the place of the individual within society and what it means when someone chooses to leave society behind. It is a strikingly contemporary story about the search for answers and those we trust to give them to us.]]> 273 Anna Metcalfe 1783789093 Greg 5 3.92 2023
author: Anna Metcalfe
name: Greg
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> 716329
For Stile, life was a matter of shuttling madly between two worlds, with the problems growing greater on each. On the science world of Proton, he was a serf, trying to prove his right to exist by competing in the Great Games. On Phaze, where only magic worked, he was the Blue Adept, trying to master the powers of sorcery. And on both worlds, someone was trying to assassinate him.

Aside from winning increasingly difficult contests with no time to prepare, all he had to do was win the love of the Lady Blue, fight a dragon, discover the ultimate weapon—and, of course, seek the paranoid Adept or the all-powerful Citizen who was trying to kill him!

And now, just when things were growing impossible, he had to fight a mortal duel with the unicorn Herd Leader, against whom his magic powers were useless!]]> 336 Piers Anthony 0345352459 Greg 2 3.95 1981
author: Piers Anthony
name: Greg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1981
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
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]]> 99461 368 Piers Anthony 0345354915 Greg 3 3.97 1980
author: Piers Anthony
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1980
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
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]]> 18070641
First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories: O Henry Award Winners (1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967).

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything...]]> 20 Joyce Carol Oates Greg 3 3.95 1966
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Greg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> 21092877
WHO GOES THERE?, according to the science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz (1920-1997), had an autobiographical Campbell's mother and aunt were identical twins and enjoyed the "game" of substituting for one another in his care as an infant and young child, confusing him again and again with false identity. It was this uncertainty, this susceptibility to masquerade and his terror at the game which, Moskowitz said, Campbell funneled into this last and greatest of his magazine pieces. (A short novel, THE MOON IS HELL, was published only in book form in the early 1950's.) Carefully and rigorously extrapolated in its portrait of the menaced expedition, the novelette is regarded as perhaps the greatest horror story to emerge form the field of science fiction. It was the basis for one of the great early science fiction films and its excellent remake decades later.

Campbell had become the editor of ASTOUNDING five months before the early 1938 publication of the story. As editor of that magazine, he insisted upon rigorous scientific background, humanized characters and values and a standard of writing comparable to that in the leading consumer magazines of the time. In pursuit, Campbell found a generation of new writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, A.E. Van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, Lester del Rey among them - who collectively (and individually!) produced an extraordinary body of work.

WHO GOES THERE? provided the basis of the 1951 cult horror film THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and was remade into John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), also regarded as a classic science fiction film, who's prequel THE THING launched in 2011. The copyright of the novelette was, typically of the time, owned by Street & Smith Publications to whose magazine Campbell had sold all of the rights. Hawks paid Street & Smith $900 for all film rights, $500 of that was paid over "voluntarily" by Street & Smith to Campbell. "Don't you feel cheated?" Isaac Asimov said he asked Campbell at the time of the film's successful release. "No," Campbell said. "If it's a good film and it will get more people to read science fiction and take it seriously, then it's all a very good thing."]]> 75 John W. Campbell Jr. 0795300662 Greg 0 to-read 3.96 1938
author: John W. Campbell Jr.
name: Greg
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 15019351
This paperback volume contains only the English rendition of the Canon, which previously appeared alongside a new edition of the Greek text in Volume 1 of the Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library.]]> 216 Constantinos P. Cavafy 0983532230 Greg 4 4.00 1934
author: Constantinos P. Cavafy
name: Greg
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1934
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/17
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
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]]> 25852828 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER �� A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship�� (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST �� MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST �� WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE ��

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]> 816 Hanya Yanagihara 0804172706 Greg 4 4.36 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Greg
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/18
date added: 2024/08/16
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]]> 16057479

]]> 160 Alexander Pushkin 1908968036 Greg 4 4.05 1834
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Greg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1834
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/25
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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]]> 57380895
The Fall of the House of Usher is a psychological thriller that narrates the descent into oblivion of the last remaining survivors of an old family. The other stories part of this compilation also show us the strenghts of Poe as an author, capable of crafting horror out of every aspect of the human experience.]]> 115 Edgar Allan Poe 8417079440 Greg 4 3.50 1960
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Greg
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1960
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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]]> 3372279 Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe. Aldous Huxley took some mescaline & wrote about it some 10 or 12 years earlier than those others. The book he came up with is part bemused essay & part mystical treatise��"suchness" is everywhere to be found while under the influence. This is a good example of essay writing, journal keeping & the value of controversy—always—in one's work.]]> 79 Aldous Huxley 0060801719 Greg 4 3.80 1956
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Greg
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/24
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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]]> 6092613 54 H.P. Lovecraft Greg 4 3.97 1928
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/27
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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]]> 153025
But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, it's the real thing. And suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere - behind the bedroom door... seated in Jude's restored vintage Mustang... staring out from his widescreen TV - dangling a gleaming razor blade on a chain from one hand...]]> 376 Joe Hill 0061147931 Greg 3 3.85 2007
author: Joe Hill
name: Greg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves:
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]]> 43532231 70 Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo 0989192210 Greg 3 3.75 1934
author: Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
name: Greg
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1934
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves:
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]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Greg 5 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Greg
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves:
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]]> 39028438 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - With a new afterword - From one of the world's most influential spiritual thinkers, a long-awaited book exploring what it means that Jesus was called "Christ," and how this forgotten truth can restore hope and meaning to our lives.

"Anyone who strives to put their faith into action will find encouragement and inspiration in the pages of this book."--Melinda Gates

In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus's last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.

Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God's constant, unfolding work in the world. "God loves things by becoming them," he writes, and Jesus's life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God--except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator's presence all around us, and in everyone we meet.

Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is.]]> 260 Richard Rohr 1524762091 Greg 5 4.43 2019
author: Richard Rohr
name: Greg
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 2294528 429 Diana Wynne Jones 0061478784 Greg 4 4.30 1986
author: Diana Wynne Jones
name: Greg
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 22035957 252 Graeme Macrae Burnet 1908643609 Greg 3 3.84 2014
author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 2261380 238 João Guimarães Rosa 0394448405 Greg 4 4.20 1962
author: João Guimarães Rosa
name: Greg
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
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]]> 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 Greg 4 3.51 2023
author: Anne Enright
name: Greg
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
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]]> 199798884
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a mother’s bedtime story to her son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Caught in the grip of her toddler’s seemingly endless terrible twos, Soldier doesn’t know who she is anymore. She spends her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be.

Tender and harrowing, Kilroy’s modern masterpiece portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.]]> 240 Claire Kilroy 166805180X Greg 4 4.09 2023
author: Claire Kilroy
name: Greg
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
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]]> 2430716 73 Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo 0435901672 Greg 5 favorites
These poems have the extraordinary, vivid imagery of Surrealists like Aimé Césaire or Alfred Jarry, but they have a more mythic feel. And the poems never devolve into playful or angry nonsense; so they have a resonance for me that other Surrealists sometimes lack.

A few love poems in the book are extraordinarily beautiful, but I think I prefer the poems that are a bit more oblique. Even the most oblique poems in this collection suggest numerous ideas and connections. The intuitive sense of meaning is always there to grasp. It is poetry at its very best, engaging the analytic brain without ever allowing itself to be mastered and reduced completely by logic alone. As with the best poetry, it can never be fully mastered by analysis because it has a life of its own, though even within its own waywardness. it has an internal logic and associations that make analysis fruitful and that provide a pathway inside of its heart.

There are repeated motifs of dreams, and the tone is by turns wistful and ecstatic. Reading this book, I experienced multiple feelings of revelation. I don't think I'm up to describing the wonderful qualities of this book!

The translator Robert Ziller has done an admirable job of preserving the magic of the experience as well. I'll close with a taste of the poetry itself - here is the last poem as translated by Ziller. I especially love the imagery of the drunk wax:

"Vain, all these anticipations
that claim to give us wings
and promise
that one day we'll seduce some Martian?

Vain too, the dream
that lost Icarus
more than the sun
that drank the marvelous wax?

Yet what certain triumph
announced to me by all these signs
that earth and sky send out
from the borders of sleep:

within our cities of living
even the most humble of huts
respond to the calls of fire
bursting from the newborn stars."

What an extraordinary talent Rabearivelo was, and what a pity that I had never heard of him before! I wonder how well known he is and if it was merely my own ignorance that I didn't know of him? I hope he is as well known as he deserves!]]> 4.04 1932
author: Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
name: Greg
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: favorites
review:
A friend of mine recommended this book, and I am not disappointed - in fact, it's the best book of poetry I have read in several years!

These poems have the extraordinary, vivid imagery of Surrealists like Aimé Césaire or Alfred Jarry, but they have a more mythic feel. And the poems never devolve into playful or angry nonsense; so they have a resonance for me that other Surrealists sometimes lack.

A few love poems in the book are extraordinarily beautiful, but I think I prefer the poems that are a bit more oblique. Even the most oblique poems in this collection suggest numerous ideas and connections. The intuitive sense of meaning is always there to grasp. It is poetry at its very best, engaging the analytic brain without ever allowing itself to be mastered and reduced completely by logic alone. As with the best poetry, it can never be fully mastered by analysis because it has a life of its own, though even within its own waywardness. it has an internal logic and associations that make analysis fruitful and that provide a pathway inside of its heart.

There are repeated motifs of dreams, and the tone is by turns wistful and ecstatic. Reading this book, I experienced multiple feelings of revelation. I don't think I'm up to describing the wonderful qualities of this book!

The translator Robert Ziller has done an admirable job of preserving the magic of the experience as well. I'll close with a taste of the poetry itself - here is the last poem as translated by Ziller. I especially love the imagery of the drunk wax:

"Vain, all these anticipations
that claim to give us wings
and promise
that one day we'll seduce some Martian?

Vain too, the dream
that lost Icarus
more than the sun
that drank the marvelous wax?

Yet what certain triumph
announced to me by all these signs
that earth and sky send out
from the borders of sleep:

within our cities of living
even the most humble of huts
respond to the calls of fire
bursting from the newborn stars."

What an extraordinary talent Rabearivelo was, and what a pity that I had never heard of him before! I wonder how well known he is and if it was merely my own ignorance that I didn't know of him? I hope he is as well known as he deserves!
]]> 1875580
In a New York City groaning under the burden of 35 million inhabitants, detective Andy Rusch is engaged in a desperate and lonely hunt for a killer everyone has forgotten. For even in a world such as this, a policeman can find himself utterly alone....

Acclaimed on its original publication in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! was adapted into the movie Soylent Green in 1973, starring Charlton Heston along with Edward G. Robinson in his last role.]]> 288 Harry Harrison 0765318857 Greg 4 3.62 1966
author: Harry Harrison
name: Greg
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2024/06/16
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]]> 138371 In the ancient city of Uruk, the tyrannical King Gilgamesh tramples citizens "like a wild bull". The gods send an untamed man named Enkidu to control the ruthless king, but after fighting, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become great friends and embark on a series of adventures. They kill fearsome creatures before Enkidu succumbs to disease, leaving Gilgamesh despondent and alone. Eventually, Gilgamesh moves forward, and his quest becomes a soul-searching journey of self-discovery.

Mitchell's treatment of this extraordinary work is the finest yet, surpassing previous versions in its preservation of the wisdom and beauty of the original.

©2004 Stephen Mitchell (P)2004 Recorded Books LLC]]> 290 Anonymous Greg 5 3.87 -1200
author: Anonymous
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: -1200
rating: 5
read at: 2019/08/19
date added: 2024/06/16
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]]> 27003
Hades' real target is the beloved Jane Eyre, and it's not long before he plucks her from the pages of Bronte's novel. Enter Thursday Next. She's the Special Operative's renowned literary detective, and she drives a Porsche. With the help of her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal, Thursday enters the novel to rescue Jane Eyre from this heinous act of literary homicide. It's tricky business, all these interlopers running about Thornfield, and deceptions run rampant as their paths cross with Jane, Rochester, and Miss Fairfax. Can Thursday save Jane Eyre and Bronte's masterpiece? And what of the Crimean War? Will it ever end? And what about those annoying black holes that pop up now and again, sucking things into time-space voids . . .

Suspenseful and outlandish, absorbing and fun, The Eyre Affair is a caper unlike any other and an introduction to the imagination of a most distinctive writer and his singular fictional universe.]]> 374 Jasper Fforde 0142001805 Greg 5 3.89 2001
author: Jasper Fforde
name: Greg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/07
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]]> 20176024 Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.

An NYRB Classics Original

Venice between the wars, a Hungarian couple on their honeymoon. But “Venice is where the trouble began”—where Mihály finds that he prefers wandering backalleys to the company of his bride, Erzsi. In Ravenna they are interrupted at an outdoor café by a man who zooms up on a motorcycle. It is a man from Mihály’s past, with a mysterious grudge and an inexplicable demand: that Mihály seek out a friend of their childhood who had been spotted in a procession of monks. Outside of Florence, Mihály fails to board the train that is to carry him and Erzsi to Rome. Thus begins Mihály’s odyssey through the cities and countryside of Italy and back through the youth that haunts him. Here he is reunited with a charismatic sister and brother, Éva and Tamás, whose strange amateur theatricals have left sex and death forever linked in Mihály’s mind; Ervin, a rival for Éva’s love and a Jew turned Catholic monk; and the man on the motorcycle, János.

Antal Szerb’s dreamlike story is a reckoning with freedom and responsibility, the pulls of love and destruction, and the ways that the past returns to be relived or rejected.]]> 301 Antal Szerb 1590177738 Greg 3 4.18 1937
author: Antal Szerb
name: Greg
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1937
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/05/25
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]]> 62888191 A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]> 336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638930368 Greg 4 4.12 2023
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Greg
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/24
date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> 51794350
Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love.

It tells of the dashing Sergeant Troy whose rakish philosophy of life was the past was yesterday; never, the day after, and lastly, of the introverted and reclusive gentleman farmer, Mr Boldwood, whose love fills him with a fearful sense of exposure, when he first sets eyes on Bathsheba.

The background of this tale is the Wessex countryside in all its moods, contriving to make it one of the most English of great English novels.]]> 368 Thomas Hardy 1853260673 Greg 3 3.96 1874
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Greg
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1874
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/24
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]]> 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Greg 5 favorites 3.97 1997
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/05/10
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]]> 35519101
And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.

]]> 158 Martha Wells 1250191785 Greg 4 4.21 2018
author: Martha Wells
name: Greg
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/05/10
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]]> 19378357 186 A.E. Housman Greg 3 4.14 2013
author: A.E. Housman
name: Greg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/22
date added: 2024/05/07
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]]> 334286 112 Peter Shaffer 0140260706 Greg 5 3.91 1973
author: Peter Shaffer
name: Greg
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
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]]> 721007 304 Olive Schreiner 0140431845 Greg 0 3.54 1883
author: Olive Schreiner
name: Greg
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1883
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
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]]> 37781 Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.]]> 215 Chinua Achebe Greg 0 3.73 1958
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Greg
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> 603241 A Separate Peace. A great bestseller for over thirty years - one of the��most starkly moving parables ever written of the dark forces that brood over the tortured world of adolescence.]]> 196 John Knowles 0553280414 Greg 0 3.56 1959
author: John Knowles
name: Greg
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves:
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]]> 505556 77 Wole Soyinka 0393322998 Greg 0 3.81 1975
author: Wole Soyinka
name: Greg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
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]]> 88564034
'My work' is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of motherhood: it mixes fiction, essays, poetry, memoir, and letters to explore the thorny, twisted ties between pregnancy, maternity, capitalism, work, art, individuality, and literature.]]> 416 Olga Ravn 0811234711 Greg 3 4.03 2020
author: Olga Ravn
name: Greg
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/04/28
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]]> 28957301
Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a milpa in her backyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. The ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge �� Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown?

In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Laia Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.]]> 276 Laia Jufresa 1780748914 Greg 3 3.63 2015
author: Laia Jufresa
name: Greg
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/27
date added: 2024/04/27
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]]> 39082248
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.]]> 213 Waubgeshig Rice 1770414002 Greg 4 3.84 2018
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/13
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]]> 22574709
Centered around seven sacraments, Evans' quest takes readers through a liturgical year with stories about baptism, communion, confirmation, confession, marriage, vocation, and death that are funny, heartbreaking, and sharply honest.

A memoir about making do and taking risks, about the messiness of community and the power of grace, Searching for Sunday��is about overcoming cynicism to find hope and, somewhere in between, Church.]]> 268 Rachel Held Evans 0718022122 Greg 4 4.20 2015
author: Rachel Held Evans
name: Greg
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> 50706646
Lin is the emperor's daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic.

Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright - and save her people.]]> 435 Andrea Stewart 0316541427 Greg 4 3.97 2020
author: Andrea Stewart
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> 25898723
Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David. Even though his impoverished family shuns him for being an artist, he is desperate to support them. Living at the foot of his misshapen block of marble, Michelangelo struggles until the stone finally begins to speak. Working against an impossible deadline, he begins his feverish carving.

Meanwhile, Leonardo’s life is falling apart: he loses the hoped-for David commission; he can’t seem to finish any project; he is obsessed with his ungainly flying machine; he almost dies in war; his engineering designs disastrously fail; and he is haunted by a woman he has seen in the market—a merchant’s wife, whom he is finally commissioned to paint. Her name is Lisa, and she becomes his muse.

Leonardo despises Michelangelo for his youth and lack of sophistication. Michelangelo both loathes and worships Leonardo’s genius.

Oil and Marble is the story of their nearly forgotten rivalry. Storey brings early 16th-century Florence alive, and has entered with extraordinary empathy into the minds and souls of two Renaissance masters. The book is an art history thriller.
]]> 362 Stephanie Storey 1628726393 Greg 2 3.95 2016
author: Stephanie Storey
name: Greg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
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]]> 353403 145 Renee Gladman 192865018X Greg 4 4.03 2003
author: Renee Gladman
name: Greg
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> 71409 here.

It's Carnival time, and the Carribean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. But to young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favourite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgivable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Here Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth--and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life...and set her free.]]> 329 Nalo Hopkinson 0446675601 Greg 4 3.93 2000
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/03/08
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]]> 33871691 'Smith's finest. Extraordinary, truly marvellous' Observer
'Superb' Financial Times 'Breathtaking' TLS 'Pitch-perfect' Daily Telegraph
'A tale of two girls who meet in a West London dance class... A page-turner that's also beautifully written ' Glamour
'There is still no better chronicler of the modern British family than Zadie Smith' Telegraph

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017

A dazzlingly exuberant new novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty

Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, black bodies and black music, what it means to belong, what it means to be free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten either.

Bursting with energy, rhythm and movement, Swing Time is Zadie Smith's most ambitious novel yet. It is a story about music and identity, race and class, those who follow the dance and those who lead it . . .]]> 453 Zadie Smith 0141036605 Greg 5 3.50 2016
author: Zadie Smith
name: Greg
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/28
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]]> 41385205 The Sunday Times

‘Oddly captivating.��
The Spectator

Set in a luxurious grand hotel just outside Lisbon, at the height of the Second World War, Estoril is a delightful and poignant novel about exile, divided loyalties, fear and survival. The hotel's guests include spies, fallen kings, refugees from the Balkans, Nazis, American diplomats and stateless Jews. The Portuguese secret police broodingly observe the visitors, terrified that their country's neutrality will be compromised. The novel seamlessly fuses the stories of its invented characters with appearances by historical figures like the ex-King Carol of Romania, the great Polish pianist Jan Paderewski, the British agent Ian Fleming, the Russian chess grandmaster Alexander Alekhine and the French writer and flyer Antoine de St Exupery, who forms a poignant friendship with a young Jewish boy living alone in the hotel.]]> 410 Dejan Tiago-Stanković 178669817X Greg 3 3.87 2015
author: Dejan Tiago-Stanković
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
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]]> 269894 A Simple Heart, also published as A Simple Soul.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions.]]> 68 Gustave Flaubert 0811213188 Greg 0 to-read 3.60 1877
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Greg
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1877
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36223860 alternate cover for ISBN 9781250186928

It has a dark past �� one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot." But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.

Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A�� stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.

What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks.]]> 158 Martha Wells Greg 4 4.23 2018
author: Martha Wells
name: Greg
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/17
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]]> 12923 The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.]]> 125 Horace Walpole 0192834401 Greg 3 3.20 1764
author: Horace Walpole
name: Greg
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1764
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
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]]> 51168664 In this witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive "feminine" passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millennia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.]]> 288 Aoko Matsuda 1593766904 Greg 4 3.77 2016
author: Aoko Matsuda
name: Greg
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/11
date added: 2024/02/11
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]]> 32758901 "As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.�� Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.]]> 144 Martha Wells Greg 4 4.11 2017
author: Martha Wells
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 56077460
In this stunning new edition of Louisa May Alcott's classic holiday tale, James Bernardin's joyous illustrations bring the spirit of a truly old-fashioned Thanksgiving to vibrant life.]]> 108 Louisa May Alcott Greg 2 3.00 1868
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Greg
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1868
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/24
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 49977811 Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism,��a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s��Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.

Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.

Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart,��Swimming in the Dark��is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.]]> 191 Tomasz Jedrowski 006289000X Greg 4 4.25 2020
author: Tomasz Jedrowski
name: Greg
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/15
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Greg 4 3.84 2023
author: James McBride
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 61102615 A fresh take on the story of Medusa, the original monstered woman.

They will fear you and flee you and call you a monster.

The only mortal in a family of gods, Medusa is the youngest of the Gorgon sisters. Unlike her siblings, Medusa grows older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know.

When the sea god Poseidon assaults Medusa in Athene's temple, the goddess is enraged. Furious by the violation of her sacred space, Athene takes revenge--on the young woman. Punished for Poseidon's actions, Medusa is forever transformed. Writhing snakes replace her hair and her gaze will turn any living creature to stone. Cursed with the power to destroy all she loves with one look, Medusa condemns herself to a life of solitude.

Until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon...

In Stone Blind, classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes turns our understanding of this legendary myth on its head, bringing empathy and nuance to one of the earliest stories in which a woman--injured by a powerful man--is blamed, punished, and monstered for the assault. Delving into the origins of this mythic tale, Haynes revitalizes and reconstructs Medusa's story with her passion and fierce wit, offering a timely retelling of this classic myth that speaks to us today.]]> 373 Natalie Haynes 0063258390 Greg 3 3.79 2022
author: Natalie Haynes
name: Greg
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 59583181
Renowned academic Dr Sparling seeks help with his project on a remote Irish village. Historical researchers Ben and Chloe are thrilled to be chosen—until they arrive...

The village is isolated and forgotten. There is no record of its history, its stories. There is no friendliness from the locals, only wary looks and whispers. The villagers lock down their homes at sundown. A nameless fear stalks the streets...

Nobody will talk—nobody except one little girl. Her story strikes dread into the hearts of the newcomers. Three times you see him. Each night he comes closer...

That night, Ben and Chloe see a sinister figure watching them. He is the Creeper. He is the nameless fear in the night. Stories keep him alive. And nothing will keep him away...

The Creeper is a masterful tale of horror and suspense, by one of Ireland's most talented emerging authors.]]> 320 A.M. Shine 1801102171 Greg 2 3.56 2022
author: A.M. Shine
name: Greg
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/02
date added: 2024/02/02
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]]> 78257
Quicksand , Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.]]> 192 Nella Larsen 0141181273 Greg 3 3.72 1928
author: Nella Larsen
name: Greg
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/19
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]]> 406626 The Remains of the Day, which sold over a million copies in English alone and was the basis of a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Now When We Were Orphans, his extraordinary fifth novel, has been called “his fullest achievement yet�� (The New York Times Book Review) and placed him again on the Booker shortlist. A complex, intelligent, subtle and restrained psychological novel built along the lines of a detective story, it confirms Ishiguro as one of the most important writers in English today. London’s Sunday Times said: “You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.��

The novel takes us to Shanghai in the late 1930s, with English detective Christopher Banks bent on solving the mystery that has plagued him all his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was eight. By his own account, he is now a celebrated gentleman sleuth, the toast of London society. But as we learn, he is also a solitary figure, his career built on an obsession. Believing his parents may still be held captive, he longs to put right as an adult what he was powerless to change as a child, when he played at being Sherlock Holmes �� before both his parents vanished and he was sent to England to be raised by an aunt.

Banks�� father was involved in the importation of opium, and solving the mystery means finding that his boyhood was not the innocent, enchanted world he has cherished in memory. The Shanghai he revisits is in the throes of the Sino—Japanese war, an apocalyptic nightmare; he sees the horror of the slums surrounding the international community in “a dreamscape worthy of Borges�� (The Independent). “We think that if we can only put something right that went a bit awry, then our lives would be healed and the world would be healed,�� says Ishiguro of the illusion under which his hero suffers.

It becomes increasingly clear that Banks is not to be trusted as a narrator. The stiff, elegant voice grows more hysterical, his vision more feverish, as he comes closer to the truth. Like Ryder of The Unconsoled, Ishiguro’s previous novel, Banks is trapped in his boyhood fantasy, and he follows his obsession at the cost of personal happiness. Other characters appear as projections of his fears and desires. All Ishiguro’s novels concern themselves with the past, the consequences of denying it and the unreliability of memory.

It is from Ishiguro’s own family history that the novel takes its setting. Though his family is Japanese, Ishiguro’s father was born in Shanghai’s international community in 1920; his grandfather was sent there to set up a Chinese branch of Toyota, then a textile company. “My father has old pictures of the first Mr. Toyota driving his Rolls-Royce down the Bund.�� When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the fighting left the international commune a ghetto, and his family moved back to Nagasaki.

When We Were Orphans raises the bar for the literary mystery. Though more complex than much of Ishiguro’s earlier work, which has led to mixed reactions, it was published internationally (his work has been published in 28 languages) and was a New York Times bestseller.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 336 Kazuo Ishiguro 0375410546 Greg 4 3.42 2000
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Greg
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
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]]> 11346 174 Toni Morrison 0452283868 Greg 4 4.05 1973
author: Toni Morrison
name: Greg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
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]]> 38953925
If they succeed, rewards and pardons await, but that requires a long journey through enemy territory, directly into the capital. It also requires them to refrain from killing each other along the way! At turns darkly comic and touching, Clockwork Boys puts together a broken group of people trying to make the most of the rest of their lives as they drive forward on their suicide mission.]]> 228 T. Kingfisher 1614504164 Greg 3 4.05 2017
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Greg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/22
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves:
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]]> 33877926 A dazzling new collection of short stories--the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.]]> 240 Haruki Murakami 1101974524 Greg 4 3.77 2014
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Greg
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> 123942 A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence�� (The Sunday Telegraph).
��
Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is ever likely to forget.]]> 112 Simone de Beauvoir 0394728998 Greg 5 4.08 1964
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Greg
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves:
review:

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