en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:55:12 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 206549834 Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival.

In an aging timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration and the medical bills from their father’s fatal illness and the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is... different, more instinctual, deeply attuned to the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a proposition and agree to attempt a heist of natural resources from Yellowstone, a federal crime. Beartooth is a fast-paced tale set in the grandeur of the American West.]]> 256 Callan Wink 1954118023 Lillian 2 contemporary-fiction 3.70 2025
author: Callan Wink
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Lillian 1 horror 3.91 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: horror
review:

]]> 192723639 176 Ada Limon 1571315683 Lillian 3 poetry 4.03 2024
author: Ada Limon
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> 218671850 A reclusive journalist is suddenly thrown into a wild, suspenseful journey to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her belligerent new husband, Rhys Kinnick finally snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched the jerk. Immediately horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the world around him, and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Seven years later, when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. So what if Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the raccoons help themselves to the monthly grocery haul? He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.

But when the militia members show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the broken world. With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind.]]> 272 Jess Walter 0062868144 Lillian 3 contemporary-fiction 4.20 2025
author: Jess Walter
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 1369997
Masked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be a candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgement of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience, an African-American. Written by the first black executive secretary of the NAACP,Ěý The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , in its depiction of turn-of-the-century New York, anticipates the social realism of the Harlem Renaissance writers. In its unprecedented analysis of the social causes of a black man's denial of the best within himself, it is perhaps James Weldon Johnson's greatest service to his race.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 158 James Weldon Johnson 0140184023 Lillian 4 classic 3.79 1912
author: James Weldon Johnson
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1912
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 205481890 An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. They wrote during the day, then spent long evenings confiding in each other and talking about race and identity in America. During one of those memorable evenings, Baldwin is said to have convinced Styron to write, in the first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner near Styron’s own Southern birthplace. Styron followed his friend’s advice, and The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968—also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

More than sixty years later, the debates and controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonate. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers Baldwin and Styron’s surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman, born in Canada to a Tunisian father and Québécois mother, and torn by the often unidimensional versions of her own identity put forth by today’s politics, media, and society. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and censorship, and, especially, the means by which public debate around these topics is increasingly radicalized, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.]]> 160 Mélikah Abdelmoumen 1771966262 Lillian 3 essays, memoir, nonfiction 4.25
author: MĂ©likah Abdelmoumen
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: essays, memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> 22096884 302 William Faulkner Lillian 0 currently-reading 3.63 1962
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Lillian 2 translated 3.64 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: translated
review:

]]> 214151304 Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring� (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.

From an author whose “writing is superb alchemy� (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.]]> 288 Emma Donoghue 1668082799 Lillian 2 historical-fiction 3.28 2025
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> 214151301 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing story about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.]]> 229 Emma Pattee 1668055473 Lillian 1 contemporary-fiction 3.72 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 224004657 Award­ winning author Ken Liu returns with his first sci-fi thriller in a brand-new series following former “orphan hacker� Julia Z as she is thrust into a high-stakes adventure where she must use her cybersecurity and hacking skills to unravel a virtual reality mystery, rescue a kidnapped dream artist, and confront the blurred lines between technology, identity, and the power of shared dreams.

Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at fourteen as the “orphan hacker,� is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a Boston suburb.

But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s waking dream and providing an emotionally resonant and narrative experience. While attendees� dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also providing a one-on-one dream experience for the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding his dreams in return for Elli.

Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.]]> 416 Ken Liu 1668083175 Lillian 4 science-fiction, thriller 4.00 2025
author: Ken Liu
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: science-fiction, thriller
review:

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

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

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

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Lillian 3 essays, nonfiction 4.34 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: essays, nonfiction
review:

]]> 220999014 A heart-stirring novel about a mother's love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager growing up in the Caribbean, from the prize-winning author of Golden Child

For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.

More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps back home and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.

Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.]]> 288 Claire Adam 0593230922 Lillian 2 3.61 2025
author: Claire Adam
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: contemporary-fiction, multicultural
review:

]]> 5797 867 William Makepeace Thackeray 0141439831 Lillian 5 3.80 1847
author: William Makepeace Thackeray
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1847
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/28
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: re-reading, classic, doorway-language, doorway-character, currently-reading
review:

]]> 10742568 489 William Faulkner 0307946770 Lillian 4 With Faulkner, you need to do the work.
Even when not great, he's genius.]]> 3.12 1954
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.12
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:
Darn near impenetrable at times but still - it's classic Faulkner. Luscious prose, and adept at painting all sides of humanity. All of those sides are often within one human.
With Faulkner, you need to do the work.
Even when not great, he's genius.
]]> 222658339 "Wonderfully ambitious.... Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book."Ěý—ĚýBrit Bennett, author ofĚýThe Vanishing HalfĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚýThe Mothers

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good� man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.]]> 304 Angela Flournoy 0063318776 Lillian 0 to-read 4.23
author: Angela Flournoy
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 158043792 "We’re mysterious aliens in the crowd. We jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or swim within a star-core. . . . We’re as unassuming as fireflies, yet our numbers grow like grass in spring. We sci-fi fans are people from the future."—Cixin Liu, from the essay "Sci-Fi Fans"

A VIEW FROM THE STARS features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

"Science fiction without guile, without snark, without ironic disaffection and all its exhausting modern baggage. It just asks what would happen? Waits for someone to answer. And then it asks again."—NPR on the works of Cixin Liu

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 201 Cixin Liu 1250292123 Lillian 0 to-read 3.55 2023
author: Cixin Liu
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220687903 “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.� ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.]]> 336 Michael Clune 0593834429 Lillian 2 4.32
author: Michael Clune
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: bildungsroman, contemporary-fiction, debut
review:

]]> 902010 256 Dorothy Baker 1590171128 Lillian 4 3.96 1962
author: Dorothy Baker
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Baker's writing is luxurious, witty, and provocative.
]]> 31299649 Alternate cover editions for ISBN 014143967X / 9780141439679 can be found
here, here, and here

In Hard Times, the Northern mill-town of Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

This edition of Hard Times is based on the text of the first volume publication of 1854. Kate Flint's introduction sheds light on the frequently overlooked character interplay in Dickens's great critique of Victorian industrial society.

Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and The Pickwick Papers, have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions.

If you enjoyed Hard Times, you might like Dickens's Bleak House, also available in Penguin Classics.]]> 368 Charles Dickens Lillian 3 3.38 1854
author: Charles Dickens
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1854
rating: 3
read at: 2017/11/17
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 220239075 New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean’s first foray into contemporary fiction, with a sharp, sexy novel about a wealthy New England family's long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.

Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge--an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.

One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her younger sister’s obsession with "vibes". Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.

A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.]]> 400 Sarah MacLean 0593972252 Lillian 0 4.28 2025
author: Sarah MacLean
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 220687867 From the beloved New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani, a “dazzlingâ€� storyteller (Washington Post), and a “comedy writer with a heart of goldâ€� (NYT), comes a novel about one woman’s quest to build her own life before it’s too late.Ěý

Jess Capodimonte Baratta is not living the life of her dreams. Not even close.
Ěý
In blue-collar Lake Como, New Jersey, family comes first. Recently divorced from Bobby Bilancia, “the perfect husband," Jess moves into her parentsâ€� basement to hide and heal. Jess is the overlooked daughter, who dutifully takes care of her parents, cooks Sunday dinner, and puts herself last. Despite her role as the family handmaiden, Jess is also a talented draftswoman in the marble business run by her confidant, her dapper uncle Louie, who believes she can do anything (once she invests in a better wardrobe). Ěý
Ěý
When the Capodimonte and Baratta families endure an unexpected loss, the shock unearths long-buried secrets that will force Jess to question her loyalty to those she trusted. Fueled by her lost dreams, Jess takes fate into her own hands and escapes to her ancestral home, Carrara, Italy.
Ěý
From the shadows of the majestic marble-capped mountains of Tuscany, to the glittering streets of Milan, and on the shores of enchanting Lake Como (the other one), Jess begins to carve a place in this new/old world. When she meets Angelo Strazza, a passionate artist who works in gold, she discovers her own skills are priceless. But as Jess uncovers the truth about her family history, it will change the course of her life and those she loves the most forever. ĚýIn love and work, in art and soul, Jess will need every tool she has mastered to reinvent her life.

Fed by the author’s cherished Italian roots comes a bighearted, hilarious novel of the the story of one woman’s determination to live a creative life that matters, with enough room left over for love. With a one-way ticket to Italy, Jess is determined to write a new story on her own terms--this time, in stone.]]> 416 Adriana Trigiani 0593183355 Lillian 0 contemporary-fiction 4.24
author: Adriana Trigiani
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 219520756 Family is everything, even when it falls apart.

After the sudden death of a renowned artist, his four adult children travel to Italy to sort out his affairs with his much-younger wife, in this moving novel from the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

World-famous artist Vic Kemp has relied on his four children ever since their mother died when they were young. Netta, the oldest, is a litigator who often serves as co-parent to her siblings; Susan, a housewife who cooks and cleans for both her husband and her father; Goose's own thwarted artistic ambitions have left him resigned to a job in Vic's studio; and Iris, the baby, drops everything the moment her father calls.Ěý

When Vic summons the siblings with the promise of big news, they hope their father is about to tell them he has finished the mysterious masterpiece he claims will be the capstone to his career. Instead, he announces he’s getting remarried.ĚýBella-Mae, his wife to be,Ěýis apparently beautiful, a fellow artist—and twenty-seven to his seventy-six years. When his children dare to express concern, Vic decamps with Bella-Mae to his summer home in Italy. Six weeks later, he is found dead. There is no sign of his will, or his promised final painting.Ěý

Netta, Susan, Goose, and Iris gather at the house on Lake Orta to piece together what happened and prepare to bring their father’s body home. They spend the summer in a waiting game, living under the same roof as Bella-Mae, and forced to confront Vic's legacy and the buried wounds they have incurred as his children. So who is Bella-Mae? Is she the woman their father believed her to be? Or is she the force that will destroy the family for good? How long can their old bonds hold?Ěý

With sparkling wit, compassion and tender insight, The Homemade God explores memory, identity, grief, healing, and the bonds of siblinghood—what happens when they splinter, and what it might take to find a new way forward.]]> 336 Rachel Joyce 0593448294 Lillian 0 contemporary-fiction 3.97
author: Rachel Joyce
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 56898102
The Winter’s Tale , one of Shakespeare’s very late plays, is filled with improbabilities. Before the conclusion, one character comments that what we are about to see, “Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale.�

It includes murderous passions, man-eating bears, princes and princesses in disguise, death by drowning and by grief, oracles, betrayal, and unexpected joy. Yet the play, which draws much of its power from Greek myth, is grounded in the everyday.

A “winter’s tale� is one told or read on a long winter’s night. Paradoxically, this winter’s tale is ideally seen rather than read—though the imagination can transform words into vivid action. Its shift from tragedy to comedy, disguises, and startling exits and transformations seem addressed to theater audiences.

This edition

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Stephen Orgel

​The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.]]> 352 William Shakespeare 1982122501 Lillian 0 currently-reading 3.44 1623
author: William Shakespeare
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1623
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 217223453 Highly acclaimedĚýNew York TimesĚýbestseller Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery…that only she can solve.Ěý

Mrs. Blossom is not the kind of woman to play the lottery. She is practical, a devoted grandmother, and has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan. But when Mrs. Blossom finds a winning ticket in a parking lot, everything changes...including Mrs. Blossom. She is determined to see the world that sometimes feels as if it’s passing her by.

But when Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS Solitaire, she did not expect to meet Allan on her transatlantic flight. He is the first man who’s sparked something inside her since her beloved husband passed.

She also didn’t expect Allan to be found, dead, twenty-four hours later in Paris, a city he wasn’t supposed to be in.

Now Mrs. Blossom doesn’t know who to trust on board the ship, especially when a new, mystifying man, Danny, keeps popping up around every corner, always present when things go awry. He claims that Allan was involved in the transport of a stolen, precious piece of art, and he’s convinced that Mrs. Blossom knows more than she lets on, regarding both the artifact and Allan’s murder.

Mrs. Blossom’s questions only increase as the cruise sails down the Seine. Why does it feel like she is being followed? Who was Allan, and why was he killed? Most alarmingly, why do these mysterious men keep flirting with her?

What follows is a charming one-of-a-kind mystery from one ofĚýTime magazine’s “essential crime writers of the last 100 years.â€� The perfect combination of cozy and thrilling, this novel and the delightful Mrs. Blossom are sure to be unforgettable.]]> 272 Laura Lippman 0062998102 Lillian 0 mystery 3.72 2025
author: Laura Lippman
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: mystery
review:

]]> 221453 304 Pauli Murray 0807072095 Lillian 4 4.19 1956
author: Pauli Murray
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 50358038
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.


Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?


An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, it is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors� (Boston Globe]]> 342 Jess Walter 006286808X Lillian 5 There is so much to praise in this incredible novel.
Where to begin?
Let's start with my favoriteĚýportal - language.
Every word isĚýmeticulouslyĚýplaced and his prose is precise.
That was the first thing that bowled me over.
I literally reveled in the language.

And the characters!
They are real, vibrant, authentic. HighlyĚýcomplex individualsĚýrepresenting every aspect of humanity; the good, the bad, the light, the dark, the internal, and the external, sometimes all of it within one human being. Jess is capable as well of developing a character fully without using any obvious descriptive words.
I am reminded of the quote by Anton Chekhov (he is my hero, by the way).
"Don't tell me theĚýmoon is shining; show me theĚýglint of light on broken glass."
That's what Jess is doing. More amazing language.
His characters are so incredibly rich and vivid that I vacillatedĚýover them. One minute I really liked aĚýcharacter. The next minute I wasn't so sure and sometimes I still wanted to like that character despite what they were doing.Ěý
What a feat!

The Cold Millions is most distinctly an homage to Jess Walter's hometown of Spokane Washington, again with all the complexities of an adolescentĚýcity painfully coming into its own. Along with that homage is a historically accurate portrait of the time period, on the burgeoningĚýlabor movement; its efforts at the time still sadly relevant today.

His masterfully paced narrative kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It went places I never anticipated. I read the entire book in two sittings because once I got to the halfway mark - I COULD NOT STOP READING.
Lastly (but not finally) I feel the story a wink and a nod to the noir mystery writers Hammett and Chandler, reminiscent of their spare, crisp, and precise prose.

I am grateful to HarperCollins for letting me be an early reader of Jess Walter's new novel.]]> 3.89 2020
author: Jess Walter
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: based-on-a-true-story, bildungsroman, doorway-character, doorway-setting, doorway-language, doorway-story, historical-fiction, re-reading
review:
I had a notion The Cold Millions would be exceptional but it has truly surpassed ALL of my expectations.
There is so much to praise in this incredible novel.
Where to begin?
Let's start with my favoriteĚýportal - language.
Every word isĚýmeticulouslyĚýplaced and his prose is precise.
That was the first thing that bowled me over.
I literally reveled in the language.

And the characters!
They are real, vibrant, authentic. HighlyĚýcomplex individualsĚýrepresenting every aspect of humanity; the good, the bad, the light, the dark, the internal, and the external, sometimes all of it within one human being. Jess is capable as well of developing a character fully without using any obvious descriptive words.
I am reminded of the quote by Anton Chekhov (he is my hero, by the way).
"Don't tell me theĚýmoon is shining; show me theĚýglint of light on broken glass."
That's what Jess is doing. More amazing language.
His characters are so incredibly rich and vivid that I vacillatedĚýover them. One minute I really liked aĚýcharacter. The next minute I wasn't so sure and sometimes I still wanted to like that character despite what they were doing.Ěý
What a feat!

The Cold Millions is most distinctly an homage to Jess Walter's hometown of Spokane Washington, again with all the complexities of an adolescentĚýcity painfully coming into its own. Along with that homage is a historically accurate portrait of the time period, on the burgeoningĚýlabor movement; its efforts at the time still sadly relevant today.

His masterfully paced narrative kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It went places I never anticipated. I read the entire book in two sittings because once I got to the halfway mark - I COULD NOT STOP READING.
Lastly (but not finally) I feel the story a wink and a nod to the noir mystery writers Hammett and Chandler, reminiscent of their spare, crisp, and precise prose.

I am grateful to HarperCollins for letting me be an early reader of Jess Walter's new novel.
]]> 77014 It focuses on Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murdering a white man. He is exonerated through the efforts of black and white teenagers and a spinster from a long-established Southern family. It was written as Faulkner's response as a Southern writer to the racial problems facing the South. In his Selected Letters, Faulkner wrote: "the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the Govt. or anybody else owe and must pay a responsibility to the negro."
It was made into an MGM film of the same name in 1949]]> 241 William Faulkner 0679736514 Lillian 5 classic 3.55 1948
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1948
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 199793438 Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Amerie’sĚýdazzling,Ěýsatirical adult debut tells the story ofĚýa Black man who walks into the light…to find himself in Los Angeles, where he becomes an instant celebrity for being the first visible and verifiable ghost.Ěý

John’s House provides all he needs. Surrounded by a vast, beautiful ocean under a void of sky, the House is John’s haven. He is alone, but never lonely; he is here now, but neither remembers nor longs for a before. In his House, John is safe and untroubled.

But then a terrible shadow creature breaks in—and it wants him out. Pushed from the House, John falls into the light�

And finds himself in modern-day Los Angeles, the first person to ever come back from the other side. Though he has no memory of his past life, or even how he died, everyone wants to know more about the Black man who has returned from the dead—is he the second coming? A hoax? Or something beyond explanation? Soon he has brand deals, TV interviews, and politicians aiming to use him for their agendas, yet all John wants is to go home.

But going home will require, most unfortunately, help. In search of a way back, John grudgingly joins forces with a mystic holding dubious qualifications, a hard-edged publicist bent on making him famous, and an aspiring actress who is unsettlingly familiar. With this ragtag band of allies, John begins a journey to find his House on the ocean—but getting there will prove more complicated than he imagined, for it will require not only trusting in someone other than himself, but will mean uncovering painful truths about who John was in life and, perhaps most difficult, who he must become.

A gorgeous, tender story of hope, sacrifice, and what it means to be human,ĚýThis Is Not a Ghost Story introduces an astonishing new voice in literary fiction.]]> 304 Amerie 0358653088 Lillian 1 3.95
author: Amerie
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: contemporary-fiction, speculative-fiction
review:

]]> 216522695 A young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.

But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Ohio for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an award-winning violist.

When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, his fledgling marriage and irresistible self-confidence spiraling into a pit of despair.

In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes fearlessly reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that in the end we are more than the men who came before us.]]> 304 Denne Michele Norris 0593729609 Lillian 2 contemporary-fiction 4.07 2025
author: Denne Michele Norris
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 214986269 A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a provocative, defiant debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder,ĚýShaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a high-class prostituteâ€�). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body andĚýunrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't aways grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potentialĚýof our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Lillian 4
Ichikawa draws on the history of disability and Japanese literature, commenting on topics from women’s reproductive rights to publishing tactics which exclude eBook formats, often the only venue available to the disabled.

Genre, narration, and storytelling are all experimental in Ichikawa's skilled hands.

In a masterpiece of an ending, the reader is left with questions upon questions in which Ichikawa asks us to probe the themes she has highlighted and see the disabled with more equitable eyes.]]> 3.51 2023
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: translated, contemporary-fiction, auto-fiction
review:
Modern feminist novelists coming out of Japan today are creating some incredibly innovative literature and Saou Ichikawa’s debut novel, brilliantly translated by Polly Barton is absolutely no exception. Our protagonist/narrator, Shakya Izawa has myotubular myopathy which has left her heart and lungs compromised such that she requires a tracheostomy and must remain hooked up to a ventilator to survive. She lives in a group home. Undaunted by her disability, Shaka maintains a virtual presence via online education, freelance writing and the ubiquitous Twitter account. Her writing is erotica, journalism and fiction, and she is unabashedly unafraid of posting controversial tweets on women’s concerns.

Ichikawa draws on the history of disability and Japanese literature, commenting on topics from women’s reproductive rights to publishing tactics which exclude eBook formats, often the only venue available to the disabled.

Genre, narration, and storytelling are all experimental in Ichikawa's skilled hands.

In a masterpiece of an ending, the reader is left with questions upon questions in which Ichikawa asks us to probe the themes she has highlighted and see the disabled with more equitable eyes.
]]> 17726 Ěý
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.]]> 365 William Faulkner 0679732179 Lillian 5 classic, historical 3.93 1942
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: classic, historical
review:
No one reads Faulkner, you only re-read Faulkner.
]]> 146559 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and now published in the authoritative Library of America text—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman.ĚýFrom these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed wiht fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.]]> 304 William Faulkner 0679741933 Lillian 5 classic, re-reading 3.89 1939
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: classic, re-reading
review:

]]> 17288631 169 James Baldwin 0345806565 Lillian 4 classic 4.41 1956
author: James Baldwin
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 51100596
Set in the earliest days of the Roman Republic, Coriolanus begins with the common people, or plebeians, in armed revolt against the patricians. The people win the right to be represented by tribunes. Meanwhile, there are foreign enemies near the gates of Rome.

The play explores one reason that Rome prevailed over such its reverence for family bonds. Coriolanus so esteems his mother, Volumnia, that he risks his life to win her approval. Even the value of family, however, is subordinate to loyalty to the Roman state. When the two obligations align, the combination is irresistible.

Coriolanus is so devoted to his family and to Rome that he finds the decision to grant the plebians representation intolerable. To him, it elevates plebeians to a status equal with his family and class, to Rome’s great disadvantage. He risks his political career to have the tribunate abolished—and is banished from Rome. Coriolanus then displays an apparently insatiable vengefulness against the state he idolized, opening a tragic divide within himself, pitting him against his mother and family, and threatening Rome’s very existence.

This edition
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Heather James

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.]]> 400 William Shakespeare 1982157372 Lillian 5 3.69 1608
author: William Shakespeare
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1608
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: classic, doorway-character, doorway-language, doorway-setting, historical-fiction
review:

]]> 63876706 224 Katherine Anne Porter 0063325241 Lillian 5 short-stories, classic 4.00 1939
author: Katherine Anne Porter
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: short-stories, classic
review:

]]> 54899969 Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.

A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published - perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.]]> 219 Zora Neale Hurston Lillian 5 classic 4.08 1937
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.â€� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.Ěý

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.Ěý

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.â€� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called â€�rules-based order,â€� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.Ěý

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Lillian 0 to-read 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34273722 The Independent) and "one of the country's fiercest satirists" (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English.
"Timeless" and "marvelous" (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones "the closer from kin the better" can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take.
A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days--a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize--tells of an elderly man who stays in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death.
With touches of the fantastical, these two novellas--masterpieces of the form--reflect the universality of mankind's will to live, live well, and live with purpose.]]> 192 Yan Lianke 0802126650 Lillian 4 3.87 1997
author: Yan Lianke
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/16
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: contemporary-fiction, translated, world-literature, noir, elastic-realism
review:

]]> 29439033 174 Buchi Emecheta Lillian 3 auto-fiction 4.00 1974
author: Buchi Emecheta
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: auto-fiction
review:

]]> 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 Lillian 4 classic 3.71 1928
author: Nella Larsen
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 215808059 An audacious and playful debut novel of adventure, brotherhood, and the search for a homeland � a contemporary classic of Quebecois literature.

Written with uncommon wit, The Harmattan Winds is a feast of wordplay, rife with puns and wonder � perfect for devotees of Ali Smith, classic adventure novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.

Narrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudel’s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their child’s world, where Hugues and Habéké haven’t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen.]]> 172 Sylvain Trudel 1962770222 Lillian 2 3.75
author: Sylvain Trudel
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: contemporary-fiction, translated, debut
review:

]]> 220984498
Through the stories of those who've obsessed over this phenomenon, Helm's extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm - and the farmer's daughter who loved Helm. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.

Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the story of a unique life force, and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.]]> 256 Sarah Hall 0571383556 Lillian 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Sarah Hall
name: Lillian
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50183625
Now, for the first time in his career, Thompson is working in serial form, in a bimonthly comic book series. Part memoir, part travelogue, part essay—all comic book—Ginseng Roots explores class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300 year long trade relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond between two brothers.]]> 32 Craig Thompson 098835134X Lillian 0 to-read 4.19 2019
author: Craig Thompson
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216989442
But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?]]> 240 Sayaka Murata 1803511176 Lillian 0 to-read 3.61 2015
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214152164 Coworkers at a legendary but troubled New York City museum struggle with issues large and small over the course of one extraordinary day in this whip-smart “marvel� (Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny) of a novel in the vein of The White Lotus.

When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four hour roller-coaster ride.

Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart her enigmatic and tireless personal assistant, Chris; the museum’s trusty head of security, Shay; and its general counsel, Henry—a man whose ability to weasel his way out of a jam is matched only by his capacity to avoid learning anything from the experience.

Orbiting Diane is a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or among them a line cook staring down a huge opportunity he’s not sure he wants; a costume curator stuck in an inescapable rut; and the ambivalent curator of the museum’s film program, whose first day on the job might very well be his last.

On this day of the museum’s annual gala, every plate that Diane has kept spinning will fall and by daybreak, someone will be dead.

Wise, surprising, and darkly funny, Friends of the Museum is a kaleidoscopic tragicomedy that surges along to the unstoppable tick of the clock, leaving you on the edge of your seat until the final second.]]> 496 Heather McGowan 1668031272 Lillian 1
With a total of 46 characters, the reader is overwhelmed by the sheer number and finds it challenging to follow each. In creating so many characters, the author has chosen not to provide depth or interiority of each character (how could she?) and they are often not distinguishable despite a page count of 400+.

McGowan has a basis in screen writing that is reflected in her prose, which is largely dialogue and reads like a screenplay.

Although sprinkled with wit and humor, the narrative is far too ambitious, expansive and quite scattered. It would have benefited from more focus.

Ultimately McGowan offers us a rare inside look at the workings of high end museum curation but the novel is weighed down by too many characters, too much drama and an overlong length.]]> 3.12 2025
author: Heather McGowan
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:
Heather McGowan’s recent novel centers on the staff and administration of an art museum based in New York City and takes place over a 24 hour period. Each section concerns certain characters and is divided into increments sometimes hourly, occasionally longer, and often shorter. At the heart is an upcoming Gala event that has people on edge.

With a total of 46 characters, the reader is overwhelmed by the sheer number and finds it challenging to follow each. In creating so many characters, the author has chosen not to provide depth or interiority of each character (how could she?) and they are often not distinguishable despite a page count of 400+.

McGowan has a basis in screen writing that is reflected in her prose, which is largely dialogue and reads like a screenplay.

Although sprinkled with wit and humor, the narrative is far too ambitious, expansive and quite scattered. It would have benefited from more focus.

Ultimately McGowan offers us a rare inside look at the workings of high end museum curation but the novel is weighed down by too many characters, too much drama and an overlong length.
]]> 783505
In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever.

Embers is a classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present]]> 214 Sándor Márai 0375707425 Lillian 4 Re-read
Check!
Review to follow.

This book is remarkable!]]> 3.94 1942
author: Sándor Márai
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: classic, doorway-language, re-reading, translated, philosophical
review:
Adult Summer Reading Book Bingo
Re-read
Check!
Review to follow.

This book is remarkable!
]]> 56852532 A firm believer in the value of education as the best route to advancement, Washington disapproved of civil-rights agitation and in so doing earned the opposition of many black intellectuals. Yet, he is today regarded as a major figure in the struggle for equal rights, one who founded a number of organizations to further the cause and who worked tirelessly to educate and unite African Americans.]]> 176 Booker T. Washington 0486287386 Lillian 2 4.19 1900
author: Booker T. Washington
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1900
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: autobiography, memoir, historical
review:
This rating primarily concerns, but is not limited to the book.
]]> 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 Lillian 4 supernatural, thriller -Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess (Translated by Alexander Trocchi)

What is it like existing in the world for centuries upon centuries while neither alive nor dead?
How do you understand death and immortality?

Two female beings separated by one hundred and fifty years, one undead and one alive are grappling with both these interrogations.

Marina Yuszcuk has painted a vivid portrait of a young woman forced into the other world of the undead. The experiences of our nameless protagonist is from her perspective rather than that of the victims. When viewing the world through her eyes, the author enables us to fully understand the difficulty of navigating the world when one is obsessed by an insatiable need for sustenance and connection and driven solely to feed the hunger for both. Marina highlights the erotic nature as well. She is seductive but fully realizes how people (and readers) are both attracted and repulsed by her sometimes simultaneously. Yet she is fierce, independent, clever, and insightful about herself and the world.

By contrast, the second narrative of the alive person in contemporary time is more subdued while continuing to face the opposite challenge of what it means to die.

Yuszcuk's prose is meticulous, vibrant and propulsive. Her pacing is masterful. The palpable vibrancy of her character stirs in readers a plethora of emotions with empathy being one of the major ones. Using a deft hand, Yuszcuk created a complex character where we also suffer their longing, and sorrowful (mournful) feeling of being locked into circumstances from which there is no escape and no end.
Thirst is an intense read that draws you in from the beginning and keeps you until you turn the last page.

Haunting and captivating.

Heather Cleary's translation is mesmerizing.]]> 3.43 2020
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: supernatural, thriller
review:
" Each time, a strange joy descended upon her; her forces were spent, and an overwhelming lassitude left her nothing but the obscure certainty that it was necessary to begin all over again."
-Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess (Translated by Alexander Trocchi)

What is it like existing in the world for centuries upon centuries while neither alive nor dead?
How do you understand death and immortality?

Two female beings separated by one hundred and fifty years, one undead and one alive are grappling with both these interrogations.

Marina Yuszcuk has painted a vivid portrait of a young woman forced into the other world of the undead. The experiences of our nameless protagonist is from her perspective rather than that of the victims. When viewing the world through her eyes, the author enables us to fully understand the difficulty of navigating the world when one is obsessed by an insatiable need for sustenance and connection and driven solely to feed the hunger for both. Marina highlights the erotic nature as well. She is seductive but fully realizes how people (and readers) are both attracted and repulsed by her sometimes simultaneously. Yet she is fierce, independent, clever, and insightful about herself and the world.

By contrast, the second narrative of the alive person in contemporary time is more subdued while continuing to face the opposite challenge of what it means to die.

Yuszcuk's prose is meticulous, vibrant and propulsive. Her pacing is masterful. The palpable vibrancy of her character stirs in readers a plethora of emotions with empathy being one of the major ones. Using a deft hand, Yuszcuk created a complex character where we also suffer their longing, and sorrowful (mournful) feeling of being locked into circumstances from which there is no escape and no end.
Thirst is an intense read that draws you in from the beginning and keeps you until you turn the last page.

Haunting and captivating.

Heather Cleary's translation is mesmerizing.
]]> 34219902
In turbulent times Americans look to the Civil Rights Movement as the apotheosis of political expression. As we confront a startling rise in racism and hate speech and remain a culture scarred by social inequality, there's no better time to revisit the lessons of the '60s and no better leader to learn from than the late Representative John Lewis.
Ěý
In the final book published before his passing, Across That Bridge , Congressman John Lewis draws from his experience as a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement to offer timeless wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful principles for anyone interested in challenging injustices and inspiring real change toward a freer, more peaceful society.

The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis, a close confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., have never been more relevant. Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence. Now, in an era in which the protest culture he helped forge has resurfaced as a force for change, Lewis' insights have never been more relevant. In this heartfelt book, Lewis explores the contributions that each generation must make to achieve change.
Ěý
Now featuring an updated introduction from the author addressing the Trump administration, Across that Bridge offers a strong and moral voice to guide our nation through an era of great uncertainty.

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work/Biography.]]> 224 John Lewis 0316510939 Lillian 4 autobiography, history 4.54 2012
author: John Lewis
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: autobiography, history
review:

]]> 201608156
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love � and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams' beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time.]]> 304 Niall Williams 1639734201 Lillian 2 contemporary-fiction 4.16 2024
author: Niall Williams
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 53409287 Called “a dangerous negro agitator� by the FBI, and a “brave woman� by Frederick Douglass, an inspiring biography of the American pioneer by Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.

Winner of a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. In this inspiring and accessible biography, Duster tells the incredible story of Wells’s life, including stories from her childhood in Mississippi, her famous refusal to give up her seat on a ladies� train car in Memphis, and her later work as a pioneering journalist and anti-lynching crusader.

Overlooked and underestimated, Wells would single-handedly change the course of American history and come to inspire millions. Ida B. the Queen shines a bright light on one of the most extraordinary women in history.]]> 176 Michelle Duster 1982129816 Lillian 1 This books shamefully does not live up to the subject.
Wells deserves so much better.]]> 3.75 2021
author: Michelle Duster
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:
Ida B. Wells was an extraordinary journalist and writer.
This books shamefully does not live up to the subject.
Wells deserves so much better.
]]> 18791 448 Edmond L. Volpe 0815630018 Lillian 0 currently-reading 4.16 1964
author: Edmond L. Volpe
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 204642521
Seven stories ricochet off of this exhilarating central novella, and in them we hear female voices by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected. The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave its reader forever altered.

From the author of Eastbound, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2023]]> 197 Maylis de Kerangal 1953861962 Lillian 4 3.93
author: Maylis de Kerangal
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Lillian 5 3.56 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 373755 316 William Faulkner 0679732187 Lillian 5 classic And you absolutely cannot read it just once.
Re-reading is a must!]]> 3.98 1936
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: classic
review:
Not for the faint of heart . . .
And you absolutely cannot read it just once.
Re-reading is a must!
]]> 214537790 FromĚýPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingĚýauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Lillian 0 to-read 4.02 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Lillian 0 to-read 3.87 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214387882 Sensual and semi-fantastic, this erotic novel by José Donoso—for the first time in English—is a thrilling and unsettling exploration of identity via sexual desire


All of a sudden, Blanca Arias has it all. The daughter of middling Nicaraguan diplomats posted to Madrid, she marries, at the age of 19, the equally young and passionate Marquess of Loria, her darling Paquito, heir to one of the largest fortunes (and most august titles) in Spain. Paquito, as if on cue, dies of diphtheria, leaving his young widowed Marquise alone, free, and inconceivably rich.


Donoso’s luxurious and disturbing work details the sexual awakening of the Marquise of Loria as her white-gloved chauffeur shuttles her from tryst to tryst. But it’s not all Patek Phillipes and pink Blanca’s mother-in-law Casilda is scheming with her gang of sycophants to take back “their� fortune from this newly-minted Loria, and there’s no low they won’t sink to to get it. The mysterious presence of Luna, a Weimaraner pup who infiltrates Blanca’s chambers and hypnotizes her with his lunar gaze, twists this glittering elegy to the literary erotica of 1920s Madrid into something a psychological thriller and a profound investigation into the surfaces that the fortunate gild and polish to hide the darkness that lies beneath.


As exuberant as it is explicit—and elegantly translated into English for the first time by Megan McDowell�The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria—shows the Boom-era master Donoso in a lighter mode, and the result is irresistible.]]> 160 José Donoso 0811232247 Lillian 4 translated
Jose Donoso’s novel, masterfully translated by Megan McDowell fits into the former category and is a novel of sexual awakening, identity, and of sexual desire.

Blanca is the daughter of a Nicaraguan diplomat who has been posted to Madrid. At age nineteen, Blanca marries the passionate and equally young Marquess of Loria. Paquito, her first love and heir to one of the largest fortunes in Spain dies of diphtheria five months into their marriage leaving Blanca alone, free, and conceivably very rich. Well aware of her beauty and powers of seduction, she sets out to put them all to the test.

At the introduction of a Weimaraner pup, named Luna, the narrative shifts from erotic romance to a story with surreal, phantasmagoric elements and a touch of the psychological thriller.

Donoso’s exhilarating and provocative language is intoxicating, which combined with a propulsive narrative, is impossible to put down.

Bold, audacious, and exuberant, you’ll want to devour it in one sitting.

Jose Donorso is one of the great boom writers who along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and others challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature and paved the way for experimental magical realism.]]> 3.73 2025
author: José Donoso
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: translated
review:
There is literature with eroticism and there is erotic literature. They are not the same.

Jose Donoso’s novel, masterfully translated by Megan McDowell fits into the former category and is a novel of sexual awakening, identity, and of sexual desire.

Blanca is the daughter of a Nicaraguan diplomat who has been posted to Madrid. At age nineteen, Blanca marries the passionate and equally young Marquess of Loria. Paquito, her first love and heir to one of the largest fortunes in Spain dies of diphtheria five months into their marriage leaving Blanca alone, free, and conceivably very rich. Well aware of her beauty and powers of seduction, she sets out to put them all to the test.

At the introduction of a Weimaraner pup, named Luna, the narrative shifts from erotic romance to a story with surreal, phantasmagoric elements and a touch of the psychological thriller.

Donoso’s exhilarating and provocative language is intoxicating, which combined with a propulsive narrative, is impossible to put down.

Bold, audacious, and exuberant, you’ll want to devour it in one sitting.

Jose Donorso is one of the great boom writers who along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and others challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature and paved the way for experimental magical realism.
]]> 215361877
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.]]> 256 Colum McCann 0593241738 Lillian 5 contemporary-fiction 3.75 2025
author: Colum McCann
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Lillian 2 contemporary-fiction 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 1219829 522 American Library Association 0838907040 Lillian 1 3.20 1967
author: American Library Association
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1967
rating: 1
read at: 2010/11/27
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:
Wondering why we had to buy this expensive (100.00) book when all of the information is available online, for FREE!
]]> 6076972 Contains: Medea; Hippolytus; Electra; Helen

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.]]> 218 Euripides 0199537968 Lillian 4 classic, play 4.14 -431
author: Euripides
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.14
book published: -431
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: classic, play
review:

]]> 975562
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.Ěý

“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.� ―William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.]]> 261 William Faulkner 0808514938 Lillian 5 I appreciate the impact of Faulkner's writings and the book was a bit 'dreamy' to read but I wasn't crazy about it like others.
With that said I do think he is a damn fine writer.

10/2024
Totally changing my mind about the book and my rating.
This is an almost perfect novel.
(And I am a closer reader than I was in 2012.)]]> 3.61 1930
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: doorway-language, doorway-setting, doorway-character, classic
review:
09/2012
I appreciate the impact of Faulkner's writings and the book was a bit 'dreamy' to read but I wasn't crazy about it like others.
With that said I do think he is a damn fine writer.

10/2024
Totally changing my mind about the book and my rating.
This is an almost perfect novel.
(And I am a closer reader than I was in 2012.)
]]> 214175232 Starring an unforgettably fierce 99-year-old Jamaican heroine, A House for Miss PaulineĚýis a transporting and tender story with a mystery at its heart that asks profound and urgent questions about who owns the land on which our identities are forged. For readers of Nicole Dennis-Benn, James McBride, and other stories about colonialism and personal history.

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her 100th birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming one of the most successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved “baby father� Clive.
Ěý
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land as his and his children’s. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies. Ěý

With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to drive her around the island, she sets off to find the people she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Ěý
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica,ĚýA House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.]]> 320 Diana McCaulay 1643757229 Lillian 3
Everything about the novel is charming and engrossing; from the delicious �patois� dialect, to the mouth watering descriptions of Jamaican cuisine, to the depiction of the stunning natural landscape. Pauline’s story becomes more robust as McCaulay draws on tumultuous historical events of the Caribbean.

Richly drawn, powerful characters tug at your heartstrings, bring tears to your eyes and make you laugh out loud.

Above it all, McCaulay’s skillful, impeccable, lyrical prose captivates you instantly so that you revel in every glorious sentence.

]]> 3.98 2025
author: Diana McCaulay
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: contemporary-fiction, historical
review:
The setting of McCaulay’s latest novel is a rural Jamaican village, Mason Hall, St. Mary’s Parish. Fierce, independent Pauline Sinclair has built a house of stone to avenge her enslaved ancestors. As she nears her 100th birthday, the stones start to rattle and ghostly voices begin speaking. These experiences are connected to a secret that Pauline has kept close for most of her life and is now ready to let go. A mystery that is the core of the narrative and McCaulay’s masterful pacing keeps you turning the page until the very end.

Everything about the novel is charming and engrossing; from the delicious �patois� dialect, to the mouth watering descriptions of Jamaican cuisine, to the depiction of the stunning natural landscape. Pauline’s story becomes more robust as McCaulay draws on tumultuous historical events of the Caribbean.

Richly drawn, powerful characters tug at your heartstrings, bring tears to your eyes and make you laugh out loud.

Above it all, McCaulay’s skillful, impeccable, lyrical prose captivates you instantly so that you revel in every glorious sentence.


]]> 25330108
Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and buildĚýthe movement for human liberation.ĚýAnd in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."]]> 158 Angela Y. Davis 1608465640 Lillian 4 essays 4.45 2015
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: essays
review:

]]> 10979 Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.]]> 507 William Faulkner 0679732268 Lillian 5 More to come.
Read four times and I'm still only touching on many of the surface themes.
Sigh . . .

A sigh of veneration of his brilliance.]]> 3.93 1932
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: classic, doorway-language, doorway-character, doorway-setting, doorway-story, re-reading
review:
Faulkner's Light in August s one of those novels whose largest portal is language but the three others, character, setting and story are not far behind.
More to come.
Read four times and I'm still only touching on many of the surface themes.
Sigh . . .

A sigh of veneration of his brilliance.
]]> 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 Lillian 3 fantasy, short-stories 3.47 2024
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: fantasy, short-stories
review:

]]> 20454072 The Great Gatsby?

Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.

With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.]]> 352 Maureen Corrigan 0316230073 Lillian 4 nonfiction, books-about-books 4.03 2014
author: Maureen Corrigan
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: nonfiction, books-about-books
review:

]]> 125164752 144 Juan Rulfo 080216093X Lillian 4 4.08 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 398087 260 Robert Alter 0393314995 Lillian 0 to-read 3.93 1989
author: Robert Alter
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58446255 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593466735.

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

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

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

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

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 255 Emily St. John Mandel Lillian 4 Her language is astonishing in that she is able to say so much with so few words and create such fully developed characters.
Anything else I could say would be a spoiler. Don't read the reviews. Come to this one fresh and open. Enjoy!

Very grateful to Knopf of PRH for letting me be an early reader of Mandel's new novel.]]> 4.16 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/25
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: post-apocalyptic, speculative-fiction, doorway-setting, doorway-language
review:
Sea of Tranquility for a spare book, spans 500 years, from 1912 to 2401, reintroduces characters from her previous novel and tells a little about the literary life of our novelist. Mandel is a master storyteller and has the skill to craft a very intricate and captivating narrative.
Her language is astonishing in that she is able to say so much with so few words and create such fully developed characters.
Anything else I could say would be a spoiler. Don't read the reviews. Come to this one fresh and open. Enjoy!

Very grateful to Knopf of PRH for letting me be an early reader of Mandel's new novel.
]]> 207627291
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place � middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.

Problem is, they’re not alone.

So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.]]> 529 Tim Winton 1035050838 Lillian 0 to-read 3.95 2024
author: Tim Winton
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210085071
Always just on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie is never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage. But the outsider holds certain advantages, sees things others don't, can influence without drawing attention. And when the map has been lost, it's anyone's guess where you may end up, or the accidental choices you find you have made. Frankie discovers that life is not always the one we hope for, or the one others expect of us.

Travelling from post-war Ireland to the dazzling art scene of 1960s New York by way of London, Frankie is an immersive, decade-sweeping novel about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.]]> 291 Graham Norton Lillian 0 4.30 2024
author: Graham Norton
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: contemporary-fiction, historical-fiction
review:

]]> 217245557 In this spellbinding historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, left pregnant and abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia Del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can't contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at the San Francisco Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, begins to uncover the truth about her father and the country that represents her roots. But as the war escalates, Emilia finds herself in danger and at a crossroads, questioning both her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.]]> 304 Isabel Allende 059397509X Lillian 0 historical-fiction 4.02 2025
author: Isabel Allende
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> 27274542 The newest edition can be found here. And here is the older one.

'I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall.'

Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work.

This edition includes a new chronology and additional suggestions for further reading.]]> 476 Jane Austen Lillian 4 classic 4.02 1815
author: Jane Austen
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1815
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 Lillian 0 historical-fiction 4.00 2025
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> 33375618 Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.]]> 96 Danez Smith 1555977855 Lillian 5 poetry 4.47 2017
author: Danez Smith
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]> 512 Karissa Chen Lillian 0 historical-fiction 4.24 2025
author: Karissa Chen
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: historical-fiction
review:

]]> 216805563 From one of the greatest writers of our time comes a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life.

In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart’s brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed.

Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the “great wind� that shifts her trajectory forever. . As she recovers, separated from her family in a children’s ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.

Emer’s tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.

In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.]]> 297 Jane Urquhart 0771051999 Lillian 0 to-read 3.82 2024
author: Jane Urquhart
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12675242 The book that Walter Kirn said was like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis" (The New York Times). � Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones get personally involved in a gang dispute in one of the most provocative cases in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. Many people had reasons for killing Ulysses Galen, a big Greek with too much money and too great a liking for young black girls. But there are complications—like Sonny, found standing over the body, high on hash, with a gun in his hand that fires only blanks; a gang called the Moslems; a disappearing suspect; and the fact that Coffin Ed’s daughter is up to her pretty little neck in the whole explosive business.]]> 194 Chester Himes 0307803279 Lillian 2 4.11 1958
author: Chester Himes
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1958
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 10975 366 William Faulkner Lillian 5 classic Wow! 3.86 1929
author: William Faulkner
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: classic
review:
Wow!
]]> 40713682
It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.

But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.]]> 333 Tom Barbash 0062258230 Lillian 2 3.72 2018
author: Tom Barbash
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2018/06/24
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: based-on-a-true-story, contemporary-fiction, doorway-story, doorway-setting, historical-fiction
review:

]]> 205363940 A legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as the director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger Than Fiction, he offers a survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. Starting with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein's and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence, Colette's and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles, and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Frank also shows how Japan’s Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends—and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack, and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and W. G. Sebald. In the manner of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history, and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing, he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.]]> 480 Edwin Frank 0374270961 Lillian 0 to-read 4.16 2024
author: Edwin Frank
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57858433 Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with Wicked by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac Out of Oz. Maguire’s new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after Wicked first flew into our lives.

Volume one, The Brides of Maracoor, finds Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices.

As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island’s civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. Is it myth or magic at work, for good or for ill?

The trilogy Another Day will follow this green-skinned girl from the island outpost into the unmapped badlands of Maracoor before she learns how, and becomes ready, to turn her broom homeward, back to her family and her lover, back to Oz, which—in its beauty, suffering, mystery, injustice, and possibility—reminds us all too clearly of the troubled yet sacred terrain of our own lives.]]> 360 Gregory Maguire 0063093987 Lillian 2 fantasy 3.86 2021
author: Gregory Maguire
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: fantasy
review:

]]> 208896788 A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black, Pushkin and FSG) won the 2021 International Booker Prize

In An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unnamed narrator struggles to regain the ability to walk after a sudden seismic event has rendered unpredictable shifts and undulations in the ground. Convinced of a need to find and kill her younger housemate, Tala, who has disappeared, the narrator struggles physically and psychically to contend with her homicidal task in the wake of failure as a Method actor. The narrator travels back in time and out into a dust-covered, shadowy city, where she is targeted by charismatic “healing� ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a paranoid suspicion of internalized, toxic language, and a desperate attempt to find stability and feel something like whole, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, and voice, taking tentative steps toward a new understanding of self and world.]]> 208 Anna Moschovakis 1593767838 Lillian 3
The vertiginous quality of Moschovakis� prose is emblematic of the disruptive environment that constantly shakes and quakes.

Via our narrator, the author mines the profound psychological dissonance caused by the seismic event and entrance of an infatuation.

Moschovakis� strength lies in her inventive and stylistic use of language, her playfulness with metaphor, with simile, with tropes; all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story.

Most impressive is her character study of someone caught in the throes of a passion they do and do not wish to escape.

Read Alikes:
Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love - Anna Moschovakis
The Possession - Annie Ernaux (author) Anna Moschovakis (trans.)
Harrow - Joy Williams
Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor (author), Sophie Hughes (trans.)]]> 3.08 2024
author: Anna Moschovakis
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: contemporary-fiction, dystopia, experimental
review:
Anna Maschovakis won the 2021 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood is Black. Her latest novel is set in a dystopian landscape in which the earth rumbles, rollicks and undulates violently, such that walking across a room is fraught with danger of falling. The nameless narrator, a former theater actor, is struggling with maintaining balance physically and emotionally. Then when Tala moves in with our protagonist, an obsession begins that forms and informs the bulk of the narrative.

The vertiginous quality of Moschovakis� prose is emblematic of the disruptive environment that constantly shakes and quakes.

Via our narrator, the author mines the profound psychological dissonance caused by the seismic event and entrance of an infatuation.

Moschovakis� strength lies in her inventive and stylistic use of language, her playfulness with metaphor, with simile, with tropes; all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story.

Most impressive is her character study of someone caught in the throes of a passion they do and do not wish to escape.

Read Alikes:
Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love - Anna Moschovakis
The Possession - Annie Ernaux (author) Anna Moschovakis (trans.)
Harrow - Joy Williams
Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor (author), Sophie Hughes (trans.)
]]> 214152160 A sweeping family saga following one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and her family amidst the backdrop of a military occupation.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, the picturesque mountain village of Poshkarbal is home to lush cherry and apple orchards and a thriving community. Yet Aisha and her mother Noorjahan live on the outskirts. A social pariah ever since her husband left, Noorjahan remains the only trusted healer and midwife and teaches Aisha about her special herbs and remedies. Isolated but content, Aisha is shocked when Noorjahan decides it’s time for her to attend the village school. From there, Aisha reconnects with her cousins from her father’s side of the family and excels in academics under the watchful eye of her teacher.

When Aisha is promised to the teacher’s son, Alim, in marriage, she is forced to abandon her dreams of college and become a wife. Their marriage is happy and fulfilling, but Aisha is also the keeper of her mother’s secrets, including the hidden poppy field that may have been the cause of her parent’s separation. As life in Poskarbal becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, Aisha and Alim eventually have children of their own, but the growing military presence forces Aisha to make impossible choices in order to save her family and preserve the independence Noorjahan fought so hard for. What follows is a family chronicle brimming with life, love, and humor, about sacrifice and honor, and fighting for your home and culture in the face of occupation.

Call Her Freedom is a lyrical, beautifully written novel about one woman’s love for her family. It is a sprawling investigation into colonialism’s relationship with loss and innocence spanning from 1969 to 2022. It is brimming with the violence of militarism, family secrets, and generational trauma announcing Tara Dorabji as a thrilling new voice in fiction.]]> 320 Tara Dorabji 1668051656 Lillian 2 contemporary-fiction 3.85 2025
author: Tara Dorabji
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: contemporary-fiction
review:

]]> 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Lillian 3 3.79 2024
author: Kevin Barry
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: contemporary-fiction, historical-fiction
review:

]]> 5485 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine� (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 288 Aldous Huxley 0060850523 Lillian 5 3.86 1932
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: re-reading, doorway-character, science-fiction, doorway-story, dystopia
review:

]]> 217004652 226 Suzanne Manizza Roszak 1963908392 Lillian 3 speculative-fiction, horror 4.40
author: Suzanne Manizza Roszak
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: speculative-fiction, horror
review:

]]> 292327
A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.]]> 206 Toni Morrison 0307278441 Lillian 5 4.18 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: re-reading, classic, doorway-language, doorway-character
review:

]]> 24128 249 William Shakespeare 0743477561 Lillian 5 3.77 1596
author: William Shakespeare
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1596
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 203871247
The Evolution of the Gospelettes follows the family and their transformation from old-time gospel singers in the 1970s to performers on a televangelist program in the 1980s to founding members of a megachurch in the 1990s. As the new millennium approaches, Jeannie, whose beliefs have evolved and irreversibly departed from her family's, fears what will happen the more entrenched they become in fundamentalist thinking and finds herself in a fight to save the people she loves from self-destruction.

This debut novel is a compelling exploration of family ties and rifts, faith and doubt, and holiness and hypocrisy in a changing world.]]> 304 Oberhausen 1950564452 Lillian 2 4.26
author: Oberhausen
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 38469 This is an older edition of ISBN 9780679761792.

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.]]> 249 James Baldwin Lillian 5 classic, short-stories 4.38 1965
author: James Baldwin
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/23
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: classic, short-stories
review:

]]> 209252878 From the International Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Memory Police comesĚýa hypnotic tale of friendship, family secrets, and coming of age set in 1970s Japan.

In the spring of 1972, after the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her wealthy aunt and uncle. It is a year that will change her life.

Her aunt’s family lives in a magnificent colonial mansion surrounded by sprawling gardens and the remnants of an old zoo, where the family’s pet pygmy hippopotamus still resides. The family is as beguiling as their home, but beneath their sophistication and charm lie darker undercurrents that Tomoko struggles to understand—her aunt’s misery, her handsome foreign uncle’s curious absences, her German great-aunt's experience of the Second World War. At the centre of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious asthmatic girl who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling, including the strange tales inspired by the illustrated matchboxes she collects beneath her bed. The two girls share confidences and enthusiasms, encounter heartache, and have their eyes opened to the workings of the adult world.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life. Beautifully atmospheric, and rich with the mystery and magic of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is a tenderly elegiacĚýdepiction of two girls poised on the brink of adulthood, and of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 289 YĹŤko Ogawa 0771019904 Lillian 4 3.70 2006
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: contemporary-fiction, translated
review:

]]> 11040450
In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount the occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. First published to broad acclaim in 1986, Fools Crow is James Welch’s stunningly evocative portrait of his people’s bygone way of life.]]> 416 James Welch 0143106511 Lillian 5 classic 4.05 1986
author: James Welch
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves: classic
review:

]]> 6570431 Old Filth has been acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, a book where life and art merge. And now that beautiful, haunting novel has been joined by a companion that also bursts with humor and wisdom: The Man in the Wooden Hat.

Old Filth was Eddie's story. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.

They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.

As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, the novel is a triumph. The Man in the Wooden Hat is fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power. It will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and so thoroughly satisfying.]]> 233 Jane Gardam 1933372893 Lillian 4 4.04
author: Jane Gardam
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2010/01/29
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
This time the author is giving us the story of Edward Feathers from his wife, Betty's perspective. It's quite enjoyable but not as delightful as Old Filth. This time around, the narrative was a bit contrived with a few too many coincidences.
]]> 144993914
Everyone within its walls has been promised full protection from the aftereffects of “the disaster.� The staff work behind the scenes to create a calming and frictionless mood; they pipe soothing music into the halls, and quickly remove the dead birds that fall out of the sky. But the specter of death remains. Recon teams come and go in protective gear. Fear of contamination spreads as the hotel cautiously welcomes survivors only to then censor news of their arrival. As the days pass, the veneer of control begins to crack, and it becomes clear that the residents of Termush can insulate themselves from neither the physical effects of the cataclysm nor the moral fallout of using their wealth to separate themselves from the fate of those trapped outside.

With an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer that makes an ardent case for its relevance to today’s world, this rediscovered classic of Scandinavian fiction is still shockingly relevant more than fifty years after it was first published. Sven Holm’s Termush is a searing and prophetic study of humanity forced into a moral bind through its own doing.]]> 128 Sven Holm 0374613583 Lillian 0 to-read 3.40 1967
author: Sven Holm
name: Lillian
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 877894 270 Ursula K. Le Guin 0399504826 Lillian 4 4.26 1979
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 150055416
A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief, to enhancing speech recovery after stroke or traumatic brain injury through singing, to improving mobility of individuals with Parkinson’s disease using rhythm.

In Music and Mind Renée Fleming draws upon her own experience as an advocate to showcase the breadth of this booming field, inviting leading experts to share their discoveries. In addition to describing therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.

Much of this area of study is relatively new, made possible by recent advances in brain imaging, and supported by the National Institutes of Health, major hospitals, and universities. This work is sparking an explosion of public interest in the arts and health sector.

Fleming has presented on this material in over fifty cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with leading researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. With essays from known musicians, writers, and artists, as well as leading neuroscientists, Music and Mind is a groundbreaking book and the perfect introduction and overview of this exciting new field.]]> 592 Renée Fleming 059365319X Lillian 0 to-read 4.19 2024
author: Renée Fleming
name: Lillian
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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