en-US Sat, 12 Apr 2025 15:31:00 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 198137716
The Japanese practice of forest bathing, shinrin-yoku, changes the levels of stress and pleasure hormones in the body, decreasing cortisol and increasing serotonin. And if being around one tree feels good, imagine how a hundred trees would feel. In her first botanical nonfiction in more than a decade, Amy Stewart brings us captivating stories of people who spend their lives collecting trees and asks what drives one to collect something as enormous, majestic, and deeply-rooted as a tree?

In her gentle, intimate, slyly humorous way, Stewart brings fifty of these people to life, organizing their stories into categories. There are the community builders--like Shyam Sunder Paliwal who, after the death of his daughter, began a movement in his Rajasthan village to plant 111 trees whenever a girl was born--who do the remarkable work of knitting people together under an arboreal canopy. There are seekers who have taken their passion for trees around the world, or even into space. There are visionaries--the former poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, who planted a tree a day for over three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And there are healers--like Joe Hamilton, who plants trees on land passed down to him by his formerly enslaved great-grandfather--who have found a way to heal their own lives, the lives of others, or even wounds of the past, by planting trees.

Vivid watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people, populate this lively compendium along with with sidetrips to investigate more about trees, famous tree collections, necessary terms, and even "tips for unauthorized forestry." This book will be a gift for the hundreds of thousands of readers who have come to Amy's previous nature books and a delightful, informative, and often poignant treat for a whole new audience.]]> 336 Amy Stewart 0593446852 Audacia 0 4.21
author: Amy Stewart
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, climate, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 205481950 A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humorous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Alice Munro


From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.


In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humorous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.


Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.


Featuring Stintzi's own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.


This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. This book is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.]]> 264 John Elizabeth Stintzi 1551529610 Audacia 0 3.95
author: John Elizabeth Stintzi
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: trans-and-nonbinary, currently-reading
review:

]]> 203579211
During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED�� sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents�� house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.

An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats �� nobody he eats �� can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.

This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.]]> 288 Sarah Maria Griffin 1250910692 Audacia 0 to-read 3.97 2025
author: Sarah Maria Griffin
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201479229 A transformational, transformative story about videogames, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction

It is 1998; Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, and they are making Saga of the Sorceress, a game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

18 years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith might be the first trans woman to ever work as an Assistant Loan Underwriter at Dollarwise Investments in Brooklyn. Sash is in Brooklyn as well, working as a research assistant and part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is there, or that Abraxa, the third member of Invocation LLC, is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s grandparents�� Jersey City home. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her quest, still far from finished.

This new book by Lambda Literary Fellow Jeanne Thornton, one of trans America’s brightest literary stars, queers our notion of nostalgia as it expertly blends literature with technology.]]> Jeanne Thornton 1641296046 Audacia 0 currently-reading 4.39 2025
author: Jeanne Thornton
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 211809097 A candid, horrific, and deeply touching new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.����Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them.��Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu��Toha's poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.]]> 96 Mosab Abu Toha 0593803973 Audacia 0 currently-reading 4.73 2024
author: Mosab Abu Toha
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 60881728 An existential manual for tragic optimists, can-do pessimists, and compassionate doomers

With global heating projected to rocket past the 1.5°C limit, lifelong activist Andrew Boyd is thrown into a crisis of hope, and off on a quest to learn how to live with the impossible news of our climate doom.

He searches out eight of today's leading climate thinkers--from activist Tim DeChristopher to collapse-psychologist Jamey Hecht, grassroots strategist Adrienne Maree Brown, eco-philosopher Joana Macy, and Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer--asking them: Is it really the end of the world, and if so, now what?

With gallows humor and a broken heart, Boyd steers readers through their climate angst as he walks his own. Boyd's journey takes him from storm-battered coastlines to pipeline blockades and hopelessness workshops. Along the way, he maps out our existential options and tackles some familiar dilemmas: Should I bring kids into such a world? Can I lose hope when others can't afford to? Why the fuck am I recycling?

He finds answers that will surprise, inspire, and maybe even make you laugh. Drawing on wisdom traditions Eastern, Western, and Indigenous, Boyd crafts an insightful and irreverent guide for achieving a better catastrophe. This is vital reading for everyone navigating climate anxiety and grief as our world hurtles towards an unthinkable crisis.]]> 416 Andrew Boyd 0865719837 Audacia 5 4.17
author: Andrew Boyd
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: climate, futures, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 27276274 It is only among the glacial mountains, cleaving icebergs, and frigid waters of Antarctica that Deb Gardener and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For a few blissful weeks each year they study the habits of Emperor and Adelie penguins and find solace in their work and in one another. But Antarctica, like their fleeting romance, is a fragile place, imperiled by the world to the north.

Each year, Deb and Keller play tour guide to the passengers on the small expedition ship that ferries them to their research station. But this year, when Keller fails to appear on board, Deb begins to reconsider their complicated past and the uncertainty of any future they might share. Then, shortly into the journey, Deb’s ship receives an emergency signal from The Australis, a cruise liner that has hit desperate trouble in the ice-choked waters of the Southern Ocean. Soon Deb’s role will change from researcher to rescuer; among the crew of that sinking ship, Deb learns, is Keller.]]> 308 Midge Raymond 1501124706 Audacia 0 to-read 3.88 2016
author: Midge Raymond
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 178632549 In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.]]> 271 Rose Ruane 1472157982 Audacia 0 to-read 3.76 2024
author: Rose Ruane
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223465293


New York City, 1998. New York is changing around Nico Kelly, and he can feel more coming.��



A private investigator and self-proclaimed photographer, Nico is stuck in a loop of city contracts and self loathing. What little middle class there was is disappearing-long-standing factories are moving out and taking their reliable neighborhood jobs with them, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's police force has the streets in a stranglehold.��



Nico spends his days looking for fraudsters while taking photos of municipal employees on disability claims. He spends his nights trying to get rid of the nagging feeling that his day job makes him a professional snitch-traversing dive bars, playing pinball, and fighting through the haze of hungover mornings and blurry evenings.



Pushing thirty years old and feeling split between his American and Latin heritage, between youth and adulthood, Nico finds himself at a precipice-who is he and what should he become?��



When Nico witnesses and records a murder during one of his insurance fraud investigations, bodies start to turn up all around him and he's forced into solving a mystery he didn't ask to solve. Humorous, gritty, and real, Nico's search for what it means to be human takes him through the deepest and darkest parts of New York City.]]> 276 Alex R Johnson Audacia 0 to-read 4.62
author: Alex R Johnson
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123979539 446 Helen Czerski 1324006714 Audacia 5 4.17 2023
author: Helen Czerski
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: adventure, animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, climate, library-reads, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 62649144 A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, offering a vivid portrait of Linnaeus's life and work



Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), known as the father of modern biological taxonomy, formalized and popularized the system of binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals. Linnaeus himself classified thousands of species; the simple and immediately recognizable abbreviation "L" is used to mark classifications originally made by Linnaeus. This biography, by the leading authority on Linnaeus, offers a vivid portrait of Linnaeus's life and work. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished sources--including diaries and personal correspondence--as well as new research, it presents revealing and original accounts of his family life, the political context in which he pursued his work, and his eccentric views on sexuality.

The Man Who Organized Nature describes Linnaeus's childhood in a landscape of striking natural beauty and how this influenced his later work. Linnaeus's Lutheran pastor father, knowledgeable about plants and an enthusiastic gardener, helped foster an early interest in botany. The book examines the political connections that helped Linnaeus secure patronage for his work, and untangles his ideas about sexuality. These were not, as often assumed, an attempt to naturalize gender categories but more likely reflected the laissez-faire attitudes of the era. Linnaeus, like many other brilliant scientists, could be moody and egotistical; the book describes his human failings as well as his medical and scientific achievements. Written in an engaging and accessible style, The Man Who Organized Nature--one of the only biographies of Linnaeus to appear in English--provides new and fascinating insights into the life of one of history's most consequential and enigmatic scientists.]]> 512 Gunnar Broberg 0691213429 Audacia 0 to-read 3.11
author: Gunnar Broberg
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.11
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1511395
The Naming of Names traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe.

Redefining man's relationship with nature was a major pursuit during the Renaissance. But in a world full of poisons, there was also an urgent practical need to name and recognize different plants, because most medicines were made from plant extracts.

Anna Pavord takes us on a thrilling adventure into botanical history, traveling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople, Venice, the medical school at Salerno to the universities of Pisa and Padua. The journey, traced here for the first time, involves the culture of Islam, the first expeditions to the Indies and the first settlers in the New World.

In Athens, Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus was the first man ever to write a book about plants. How can we name, sort, and order them? He asked. The debate continues still, two thousand years later. Sumptuously illustrated in full colour, The Naming of Names gives a compelling insight into a world full of intrigue and intensely competitive egos.]]> 480 Anna Pavord 1596910712 Audacia 0 to-read 4.12 2005
author: Anna Pavord
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40718364 The Secret Life of Cows

A life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, through the prism of a brilliant new nature writer’s experience working as a traditional mole-catcher, and why he gave it up.

I have been catching moles in gardens and farms for years and I have decided that I am not going to do it any more. Molecatching is a traditional skill that has given me a good life but I am old now and tired of hunting and it has taught me what I needed to learn.

Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy, sleeping in hedgerows.

Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment.

How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.]]> 256 Marc Hamer 1787301249 Audacia 0 4.17 2019
author: Marc Hamer
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, nature-wildness-food-farms, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 209078957 240 Rosalie Haizlett 1680516353 Audacia 0 to-read 4.93
author: Rosalie Haizlett
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56347250
Nature illustrator Rosalie Haizlett has hiked through countless forests with her sketchbook and watercolors, documenting the plants, animals and landscapes that she encounters. She has also taught tens of thousands of students to paint and appreciate nature’s beauty through her popular online classes and in-person workshops.

In this book, Rosalie provides step-by-step instruction on how to paint 20 realistic insects, fungi, birds, botanicals and mammals in her vibrant wet- on-dry watercolor style. Pick up the skills you need to become a better observer in the outdoors, take your own reference photos and paint a wide variety of subjects so that you can continue to draw inspiration from nature long after you finish the projects in this book. You’ll also learn some fun nature facts along the way! Whether you’re a total beginner or ready to take your skills to the next level, Rosalie is here to walk you through every step of the process.]]> 168 Rosalie Haizlett 1645674142 Audacia 0 to-read 4.74 2021
author: Rosalie Haizlett
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.74
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23129923 " I wonder", said Hermes, "what it would be like if animals had human intelligence."
" I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals �� any animal you like �� would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence."

And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change.

The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.

André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.]]> 171 André Alexis 1552453057 Audacia 0 3.79 2015
author: André Alexis
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 112974865
When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard's closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist's mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice.]]> 237 Pagan Kennedy 0593314727 Audacia 5 3.90 2025
author: Pagan Kennedy
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: audiobook, cultural-studies, gender-and-sexuality, history-of-science, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 13131528 A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself.

The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.

With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.]]> 448 Jason Roberts 0385666802 Audacia 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Jason Roberts
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199489425 An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time’s deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.

A reckoning and a manifesto, Botany of Empire provides experts and general readers alike with a roadmap for transforming the colonial foundations of plant science.]]> 328 Banu Subramaniam 0295752467 Audacia 0 to-read 4.14
author: Banu Subramaniam
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213618152 From a rising literary star and the author of How to Be a Good Girl comes��a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, How to Be a Good Girl,��an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's “bold vulnerability,�� and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020.��

In Trauma Plot, her long-awaited follow-up, Hood turns her eye to the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable. In her trademark blend of memoir and criticism, Hood investigates the lives of art's most infamous women, from Ovid's Philomela and David Lynch’s Laura Palmer to Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter who captured Judith’s wrath—as well as Hood herself,��reckoning with three decades of sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. In so doing, she What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them?��

Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for “trauma porn,�� a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to��life after death.]]> 336 Jamie Hood 059370097X Audacia 5 4.61 2025
author: Jamie Hood
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: audiobook, memoir, read-in-2025, trans-and-nonbinary
review:

]]> 217547906 An essential introduction to trans history, from ancient times to the present day, in full-color graphic nonfiction format. Deeply researched, highly readable, and featuring a broad range of voices.

What does “trans�� mean, and what does it mean to be trans? Diversity in human sex and gender is not a modern phenomenon, as readers will discover through illustrated stories and records that introduce historical figures ranging from the controversial Roman emperor Elagabalus to the swashbuckling seventeenth-century conquistador Antonio de Erauso to veterans of the Stonewall uprising Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. In addition to these individual profiles, the book explores some of the societal roles played by trans people beginning in ancient times and shows how European ideas about gender were spread across the globe. It explains how the science of sexology and the growing acceptance of (and backlash to) gender nonconformity have helped to shape what it means to be trans today. Illustrated conversations with modern activists, scholars, and creatives highlight the breadth of current trans experiences and give readers a deeper sense of the diversity of trans people, a group numbering in the millions. Extensive source notes provide further resources. Moving, funny, heartbreaking, and empowering, this remarkable compendium from trans creators Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett is packed with research on every dynamic page.]]> 384 Alex L. Combs 1536244171 Audacia 0 to-read 4.58
author: Alex L. Combs
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.58
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214151495 From RuPaul’s Drag Race winner and host of �����’s We’re Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and music.

In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say.

Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way—by following in the footsteps of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Harriet wants to put on a show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her.

She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed by a rival at the BET Awards. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have one week to write a Broadway caliber musical she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only mount a show that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future.

Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).]]> 240 Bob the Drag Queen 166806197X Audacia 5 4.11 2025
author: Bob the Drag Queen
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: audiobook, fiction, lgbtq, nyc, racism, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 218726509 244 Anton Solomonik 1736716883 Audacia 0 4.44
author: Anton Solomonik
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025, short-stories, trans-and-nonbinary
review:

]]> 63833356
After his relationship with his girlfriend of 5 years ended, Harry realised he was a single adult for the first time �� not only that, but a single, transmasculine and newly out gay man.

Despite knowing it was the right decision, the reality of his new situation was terrifying. How could he be a gay man, when he was still learning what it was to be a man? Would the gay community embrace him or reject him? What would gay sex be like? And most importantly, would finding love again be possible?

In this raw, intimate and unflinchingly honest book, we follow Harry as he navigates the sometimes fraught and contradictory worlds of contemporary gay culture as a trans gay man, from Grindr, dating and gay bars, to saunas, sex and ultimately, falling in love. Harry’s brave and uplifting journey will show you there is joy in finding who you are.]]> 224 Harry Nicholas 1839971835 Audacia 0 4.05 2023
author: Harry Nicholas
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: audiobook, lgbtq, memoir, read-in-2025, trans-and-nonbinary
review:

]]> 209191701 256 Nat Raha 0745349404 Audacia 0 to-read 4.40
author: Nat Raha
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33795 �䲹�ܳ�����������Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel and��national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

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

Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).]]> 413 Danzy Senna 1573227161 Audacia 0 4.07 1998
author: Danzy Senna
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: audiobook, authors-to-read-more, library-reads, racism, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 208430625 From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book�� (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest��imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.]]> 224 Katherine Rundell 0385550820 Audacia 0 4.17 2024
author: Katherine Rundell
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Audacia 0 to-read 4.42 2025
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220259184 Heartwood takes you on a journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.]]> 320 Amity Gaige 1668063603 Audacia 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Amity Gaige
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214537790 From��Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling��author 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 Audacia 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214986196 From the New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things, a sparkling and funny new novel of entertainment, ambition, art, and love.

Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.

Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot’s mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It’s not long before Cherry must decide how much she’s willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act—and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.

Equal parts bravado, tenderness, and humor, and bursting with misfits, magicians, musicians, and mimes, Stop Me If You've Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.]]> 272 Kristen Arnett 0593719778 Audacia 0 fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025 3.71 2025
author: Kristen Arnett
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 33275357 Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.

Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.]]> 240 Danzy Senna 159448709X Audacia 0 to-read 3.24 2017
author: Danzy Senna
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

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

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

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Audacia 5 4.09 2025
author: Torrey Peters
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: audiobook, fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025, trans-and-nonbinary
review:

]]> 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing �� formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness �� are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Audacia 0 to-read 4.33 2025
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217896244
Meanwhile, Alison’s first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel’s beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).

As the TV show��Death and Taxidermy��racks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison’s Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison’s own envy spirals.��Why couldn’t she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…like��Queer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?

Spent’s rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what’s true about life in the world at this moment, before it’s too late—once again proves that “nobody does it better�� (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.]]> 272 Alison Bechdel 0063278928 Audacia 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004043 An electrifying debut about a nonbinary corporate burnout embarking on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas to find their conspiracy-theorist father, who has gone missing—for fans of Detransition Baby and Chain-Gang All-Stars

The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders.

A call from their mother with the news that their MAGA-friendly, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing launches the narrator from Chicago to deep red Arkansas in a stolen car. Along the way, the narrator and their new bestie—a self-proclaimed "garbage goth" with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail)—unpack the narrator’s childhood and a recent personal loss that they refuse to face head-on.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.]]> 224 Zee Carlstrom 1250365678 Audacia 0 3.79 2025
author: Zee Carlstrom
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: audiobook, fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025, trans-and-nonbinary
review:

]]> 146500640 In this second vibrant fantasy from Maggie Tokuda-Hall, companion to her best-selling debut, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, a diverse resistance force fights to topple an empire in a story about freedom, identity, and decolonization.

By sinking a fleet of Imperial Warships, the Pirate Supreme and their resistance fighters have struck a massive blow against the Emperor. Now allies from across the empire are readying themselves, hoping against hope to bring about the end of the conquerors�� rule and the rebirth of the Sea. But trust and truth are hard to come by in this complex world of mermaids, spies, warriors, and aristocrats. Who will Genevieve—lavishly dressed but washed up, half-dead, on the Wariuta island shore—turn out to be? Is warrior Koa’s kindness toward her admirable, or is his sister Kaia’s sharp suspicion wiser? And back in the capital, will pirate-spy Alfie really betray the Imperials who have shown him affection, especially when a duplicitous senator reveals xe would like nothing better?

Meanwhile, the Sea is losing more and more of herself as her daughters continue to be brutally hunted, and the Empire continues to expand through profits made from their blood. The threads of time, a web of schemes, shifting loyalties, and blossoming identities converge in Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s remarkable companion to The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, as unlikely young allies work to forge a new and better world.]]> 320 Maggie Tokuda-Hall 1536218057 Audacia 0 to-read 4.08 2023
author: Maggie Tokuda-Hall
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211960914 In this nuanced queer fantasy set amid the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, the last witch of the Ridge must choose sides in a clash between industry and nature.

After her best friend dies in a coal mine, Benethea “Bennie�� Mattox sacrifices her job, her relationship, and her reputation to uncover what’s killing miners on Kire Mountain. When she finds a half-drowned white woman in a dirty mine slough, Bennie takes her in because it’s right—but also because she hopes this odd, magnetic stranger can lead her to the proof she needs. Instead, she brings more questions. The woman called Motheater can’t remember her true name, or how she ended up inside the mountain. She knows only that she’s a witch of Appalachia, bound to tor and holler, possum and snake, with power in her hands and Scripture on her tongue. But the mystery of her fate, her doomed quest to keep industry off Kire Mountain, and the promises she bent and broke have followed her a century and half into the future. And now, the choices Motheater and Bennie make together could change the face of the town itself.]]> 416 Linda H. Codega 1645661792 Audacia 5 3.46 2025
author: Linda H. Codega
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: books-by-people-i-know, climate, fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 209771513 On the Galápagos Islands, the lives of two women—a century apart—converge in the most startling ways in a historical novel of desperate love, secrets, and deception by the author of My Last Continent.

After ten years away to build a family, Mallory returns to Floreana Island in the Galápagos, and to Gavin, the mentor with whom she had a long-ago affair. Their project is to build nests to revive the vulnerable penguin population. But Mallory doesn’t dare tell Gavin why she’s really come back. Then she discovers old journals hidden in a lava cave—confessions of another woman who needed to disappear.

In 1929, Dore Strauch left the life she knew to create a new one with the man she loved. On remote Floreana they’re beholden to no one but each other. Until the arrival of strangers, settlers in their paradise. Suddenly, Dore realizes that it’s no longer the refuge she imagined. And that amid the island’s fragile beauty, people can do the most terrible things.

A gripping reimagining of a true story, Floreana intertwines the emotional journeys of two women bound by dark secrets, the want of escape, and the lengths to which they’ll go to find their place in the world.]]> 261 Midge Raymond 1662522827 Audacia 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Midge Raymond
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61659710 The Boys�������ٲ���Starter Villain�����Ի���Assistant to the Villain��in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel,��Hench,��in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will��literally��annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes�� have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.]]> 368 Natalie Zina Walschots 0063341360 Audacia 0 to-read 4.50 2025
author: Natalie Zina Walschots
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213344050
Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experiences. While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor specializes in the study of grief, and in The Grieving Body she shares vital scientific research, revealing imperative new insights on its profound physiological impact. As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being.

The Grieving Body addresses questions about how bereavement affects us, such as:

Can we die of a broken heart?
What happens in our bodies when we’re grieving?
How do our coping behaviors affect our physical health?
What is the cognitive impact of grief?
Why are we more prone to illness during times of enormous stress?
and more
Research-backed, warm, and empathetic, The Grieving Body is an essential, hopeful read for those experiencing loss as well as their supportive friends and family.

The Grieving Body is illustrated with black-and-white charts and graphs.]]> 304 Mary-Frances O'Connor 0063338904 Audacia 0 to-read 3.81
author: Mary-Frances O'Connor
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217927404 Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.

“She is the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson. . . . To us, Tourmaline is the expert.”—Janet Mock, Allure

“Thank god the revolution has begun, honey.�� Rumor has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet there has never been a definitive record of her life. Until now.��
��
Written with sparkling prose,��Tourmaline’s richly researched biography Marsha finally brings this iconic figure to life, in full color. We vividly meet Marsha as both an activist and She performed with RuPaul and with the internationally renowned drag troupe The Hot Peaches. She was a muse to countless artists from Andy Warhol to the band Earth, Wind & Fire. And she continues to inspire people today.
��
Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up.��Her story promises to inspire readers to live as their most liberated, unruly, vibrant, and whole selves.]]> 320 Tourmaline 0593185668 Audacia 0 to-read 4.71 2025
author: Tourmaline
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205902742 From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.

In recent years, “white feminism�� and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.

Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms /em> is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.]]> 342 Sophie Lewis Audacia 0 to-read 4.18 2025
author: Sophie Lewis
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 227218639 Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power


As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.


With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby―gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.


Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer―not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.


This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. This book is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.]]> 113 Dawn Amber 1551529807 Audacia 0 to-read 5.00
author: Dawn Amber
name: Audacia
average rating: 5.00
book published:
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]]> 216970872 The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.

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

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

By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to��show how crucial this process�� can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.]]> 224 Lidia Yuknavitch 0593713052 Audacia 5 4.42 2025
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: audiobook, gender-and-sexuality, lgbtq, memoir, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 214537674 “Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”��#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age.

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the lack of excitement is starting to a professional killer can only take so many watercolor classes and yoga sessions without itching to strangle someone...literally. When they receive a summons from the head of the elite assassin organization known as the Museum, they are ready tackle the greatest challenge of their careers.

Someone on the inside has compiled a list of important kills committed by Museum agents, connected to a single, shadowy figure, an Eastern European gangster with an iron fist, some serious criminal ambition, and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. This new nemesis is murdering agents who got in the way of their power hungry plans and the aging quartet of killers is next.

Together the foursome embark on a wild ride across the globe on the double mission of rooting out the Museum’s mole and hunting down the gangster who seems to know their next move before they make it. Their enemy is unlike any they’ve faced before, and it will take all their killer experience to get out of this mission alive.]]> 359 Deanna Raybourn 0593638522 Audacia 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> 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 Audacia 0 to-read 3.66 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
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 Audacia 0 to-read 3.83 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 223263228 "An astonishing novel of discovery, heartache, and redemption. Costello writes unapologetically about surviving in a broken world against all odds. Truly unforgettable.�� -Erin Entrada Kelly, two-time Newbery Medalist and National Book Award Finalist

Self-styled “beautiful boy�� Toby Ryerson dreams in stardust but lives in the dirt. Haunted by the specter of his mom’s overdose, he itches for a life of fun and fabulosity far from the MAGA hats of his backwoods Adirondack town. The only problem: his older brother Jimmy’s plans to polish him into a spotless “Disney gay�� with college, career, and husband. Toby knows that Jimmy didn’t sacrifice everything to raise him just so he can waste his life on men and partying like Mom did. But why can’t Jimmy see that he is their mother’s son?

When Toby outs the boy who broke his heart in a fit of rage, the web of lies he’s spun to manage Jimmy’s expectations quickly unravels. A brutal beating leads to a campaign of cyberbullying, culminating in even greater disaster.

Worse: Toby knows it’s all his own fault.

Enter Gabe, a sexy stranger from Mom’s past who seduces Toby with the keys to the Big Apple. But when Toby’s dreams of a fabulous life in the city quickly turn into a nightmare, will Jimmy's love be enough to save him, or will he end up just like Mom?

AN UGLY WORLD FOR BEAUTIFUL BOYS is a gritty and harrowing queer coming-of-age novel as well as a love story between two mismatched brothers coping with the burden of secrets and a legacy of shame.


“Rob Costello has crafted an exquisitely haunting, gorgeously-written portrait of survival and resilience with An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys. This story is necessary, especially for anyone who has ever felt alone or misunderstood. All too real, it is at once painful and gritty, yet brimming with hope and the profound power of love and understanding. Toby’s story will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.��

- Amber Smith, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Way I Used to Be and The Way I Am Now


“Toby's coming-of-age trainwreck reads like the tensest of thrillers and hurts like your worst teenage memory. It's gorgeously written, ultimately healing, and absolutely unforgettable."

-Nancy Werlin, National Book Award Finalist for The Rules of Survival


"Gritty, lyrical, and refreshingly honest, Costello's debut novel pulses with realness, as raw and resilient as its oh-so-human protagonist. A triumph.��

-Nora Shalaway Carpenter, award-winning author of Fault Lines & The Edge of Anything


"If you’re looking for a raw, unfiltered journey into the heart of a difficult and complex queer experience, An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys is a must-read. Rob Costello has crafted an unflinching coming-of-age story that dives headfirst into the chaos of self-discovery, loss, and redemption through Toby Ryerson: an imperfect, impulsive young man who is trying to survive when everything falls apart. An unforgettable debut novel."

-Christopher Barzak, author of Stonewall Honor winning novel, Wonders of the Invisible World


"This novel shines in its exploration of the various ways masculinity manifests in the lives of young men, highlighting the damaging effects of toxic masculinity in every scenario. Costello has created multi-dimensional characters who are raw, imperfect, and utterly human. Readers will find themselves swept up in Toby’s joy, only to feel frustration when he makes mistakes�� An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys is a deeply moving novel about finding self-acceptance and communal joy amidst life’s messiness."

-Samantha Hui, Independent Book Review]]> 376 Rob Costello 1590217969 Audacia 0 to-read 5.00
author: Rob Costello
name: Audacia
average rating: 5.00
book published:
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]]> 210118792 “Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus

"1845. The sky is blue, yet all is brown. I picture the scene from a silvered steel of violence, blood, beer, whiskey, and mutton. High, skidding clouds skip with excitement, eager to see what unfolds below. They cheer on the scene where men in dresses march."

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills in 2005, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. Prompted to leave London following a mysterious illness that seems to be caused by life in the city itself, she finds in these ancient mountains—at once the northernmost part of Appalachia and a longtime refuge for New Yorkers—a place "where the land itself holds time."

She forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes, finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land. As the Great Recession sets in and a housing crisis looms, she supports herself with freelance work and adjunct teaching, slowly learning of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords' vast estates. In the farmers�� socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents�� collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.]]> 276 Jennifer Kabat 1639550690 Audacia 5 memoir, read-in-2025 4.33
author: Jennifer Kabat
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: memoir, read-in-2025
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]]> 125070942
Teeming with animal life, this book shows how life on Earth is interconnected and thriving in more places than you might think! Children aged 7-11 will be fascinated by what goes on under their feet, learning about the incredible diversity of life on planet Earth.

Life Underground takes children on an illustrated journey into the world’s most amazing underground habitats, from warm Arctic warrens to sandy desert dens. Explore the different communities of animals and plants that live under the Earth, from the succulent soil of an Australian forest to the hard ground at the icy north. Find out how animals and plants are adapted to their environment and how they interact with their surroundings and each other.

This nature book for children ��

- Material that supports the science curriculum in schools up to Grades 3-5 �� perfect for nature-loving children aged 7��11, and reluctant readers.
- A look at Earth’s major underground habitats and shows the animals that live there.��
- Beautifully detailed panoramic artworks show each underground scene teeming with life, with burrowing animals placed around the edge of the page for readers to find in the illustration.

This illustrated guide lets children tunnel into a world of wildlife and explore different habitats, whilst teaching about different animal species and where they live. Details are drawn out from the artwork so that each habitat is easy to follow, making this the ideal nature book to have on your shelf.]]> 32 D.K. Publishing 0744084725 Audacia 0 to-read 4.50
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> 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.�� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.��

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.��

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.�� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,�� 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.��

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 Audacia 0 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: aplus-favorites, audiobook, read-in-2025
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]]> 215089400 360 Jennifer Kabat 1639550704 Audacia 0 to-read 4.00
author: Jennifer Kabat
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 213816151 “Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart.��
―Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.

Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation―on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look.

In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense―of anything, really―but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize―through its exuberant language, its playful curation, and its delightful associative leapfrogging―that they are, in fact, one in the same.]]> 304 A. Kendra Greene 1963108086 Audacia 0 to-read 3.72
author: A. Kendra Greene
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.72
book published:
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date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62987068
For the past fifty years, this promise, the Endangered Species Act, has ensured that the most threatened and vulnerable species and their habitats are protected. From the Steller sea lion to the ivory-billed woodpecker, from the steelhead trout to the red wolf, this landmark act has worked to preserve the wild beauty that surrounds and sustains us.In A Wild Promise, acclaimed artist Allen Crawford beautifully illustrates over eighty animals that embody the spirit, legacy, and commitment of the Endangered Species Act. In his trademark inventive style, Crawford’s full-color illustrations and illuminated text create a vibrant tapestry of our nation’s habitats—oceans, mountains, deserts, wetlands, prairies, and forests—and the varied species that call these places home. With a powerful and moving introduction by award-winning writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams, A Wild Promise is critically urgent and inspirational, lending voice and spirit to all endangered species. A visually delightful, one-of-a-kind work, A Wild Promise is a celebration of conservation, commitment, and compassion—a clarion call to continue to embrace, engage, and act in ways that preserve and protect our living world.]]> 208 Allen Crawford 195353497X Audacia 0 to-read 4.29
author: Allen Crawford
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 205973372
The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies is a masterful and touching memoir blending natural history, pop culture, and literary biography―delivering a richly layered and nuanced portrait of a son’s attempt, after years of stubborn resistance, to take on his dying father’s love of the natural world. With his father unable to leave the house and follow the butterfly cycle for the first time since he was a child, Masters endeavors to become his connection to the outdoors and his treasured butterflies, reporting back with stories of beloved species―Purple Emperors, Lulworth Skippers, Wood Whites and Silver-studded Blues―and with stories of the woods and meadows that are their habitats and once were his. Structured around a series of exchanges and remembrances, butterflies become a way of talking about masculinity, memory, generational differences, and ultimately loss and continuation. Masters takes readers on an unlikely journey where Luther Vandross and The Sopranos rub shoulders with the likes of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf on butterflies and gender; the metamorphoses of Prince; Zadie Smith on Joni Mitchell and how sensibilities evolve; and the lives and works of Vladimir Nabokov and other literary lepidopterists.

In this beautiful debut memoir, Ben Masters offers an intensely authentic, unforgettable portrait of a father and son sharing passions, lessons, and regrets before they run out of time.]]> 352 Ben Masters 1959030817 Audacia 0 to-read 3.95
author: Ben Masters
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 59593246 Forest Walking teaches you how to get the most out of your next adventure by becoming a forest detective, decoding nature’s signs and awakening to the ancient past and thrilling present of the ecosystem around you.

What can you learn by following the spread of a root, by tasting the tip of a branch, by searching out that bitter almond smell?

What creatures can be found in a stream if you turn over a rock—and what is the best way to cross a forest stream, anyway?

How can you understand a forest’s history by the feel of the path underfoot, the scars on the trees along the trail, or the play of sunlight through the branches?

How can we safely explore the forest at night?

What activities can we use to engage children with the forest?

Throughout Forest Walking, the authors share experiences and observations from visiting forests across North America: from the rainforests and redwoods of the west coast to the towering white pines of the east, and down to the cypress swamps of the south and up to the boreal forests of the north.]]> 240 Peter Wohlleben 1771643315 Audacia 0 3.81 2022
author: Peter Wohlleben
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: adventure, animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, climate, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 222658334 From “The Internet’s Mushroom Auntie,�� a stunning memoir and illustrated field guide with recipes that shows us how to find ourselves through the edible wild world all around us.

Foraging is becoming increasingly popular, from TikTok to tasting menus at the most exclusive restaurants around the world. People are discovering that delicious wild edibles are waiting for us in our own backyards, led by champions such as Gabrielle Cerberville. Known as “The Chaotic Forager�� online, Cerberville argues that foraging is the past, present, and future of food, and the key to unlocking a reciprocal relationship with the land that feeds us. Through learning to engage with the world of wild food, she contends, we can also build a kinder, more respectful relationship with ourselves.

Gathered is an adventure in foraging that awakens us to the beauty of the seasons and the world we live in, heightening our senses to the crunch of snow underfoot and the sharp prick of a thorny bramble. Season by season, Cerberville takes us along through winning harvests and missteps, introducing us to the beautiful complications of foraged edibles and the various ways to eat and prepare them in delicious recipes such as Chanterelle Peach Pie with Basil, Wild Blueberry Ginger Gimlets, and Pulled Hen of the Woods with Juneberry BBQ Sauce. Cerberville also chronicles indigenous practices of honoring the earth, and their own long road to self-discovery and acceptance.

With this book as a guide, readers will learn to find, identify, harvest, and process wild food to use in their own kitchens and develop a greater kinship with the natural world. A memoir with recipes, color photos, and illustrations throughout, Gathered is an invitation to move beyond our comfort zones, open our eyes, and dig into the earth.

Gathered contains 20 black-and-white photos and 30-40 full-color photos in a 32-page insert.]]> 304 Gabrielle Cerberville 0063357917 Audacia 0 to-read 0.0
author: Gabrielle Cerberville
name: Audacia
average rating: 0.0
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]]> 211934921 Twelve delightfully strange, haunting stories from the acclaimed, oracular author of Beautyland.

Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness�� haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.]]> 208 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374616477 Audacia 0 to-read 4.00
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 53237620 256 Judith D. Schwartz 1603588655 Audacia 0 to-read 4.07
author: Judith D. Schwartz
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Audacia 5 4.32 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, fiction, futures, nature-wildness-food-farms, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 213245164 From the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers

In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water

In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A grieving mother finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. And a nervous child dances in her first Mawi’omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award-winning and title story “Waiting for the Long Night Moon.��

At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.]]> 256 Amanda Peters 1646222598 Audacia 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Amanda Peters
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> 212923993 A mother and son, estranged but yearning for reunion, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart for decades in this highly anticipated novel by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal��)

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of his clients only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With unsurpassed emotional depth,��Mothers and Sons��reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and what might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett��demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts�� (New York Times).]]> 336 Adam Haslett 0316574716 Audacia 0 fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025 3.81 2025
author: Adam Haslett
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: fiction, lgbtq, read-in-2025
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]]> 59808486
On New Year’s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer’s beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored.

Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.

The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation.

Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is a profound, immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.]]> 400 Amy-Jane Beer 1472977394 Audacia 0 to-read 4.04
author: Amy-Jane Beer
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.04
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]]> 31932836 A charming story of Mozart and his pet starling, along with a natural history of the bird.

On May 27th, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met a flirtatious little starling who sang (an improved version of!) the theme from his Piano Concerto Number 17 in G to him. Knowing a kindred spirit when he met one, Mozart wrote "That was wonderful" in his journal and took the bird home to be his pet. For three years Mozart and his family enjoyed the uniquely delightful company of the starling until one fitful April when the bird passed away.

In 2013, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet, rescued her own starling, Carmen, who has become a part of her family. In Mozart's Starling, Haupt explores the unlikely bond between one of history's most controversial characters and one of history's most notoriously disliked birds. Part natural history, part story, Mozart's Starling will delight readers as they learn about language, music, and the secret world of starlings.

A charming story of Mozart and his pet starling, along with a natural history of the bird.]]> 256 Lyanda Lynn Haupt 0316269565 Audacia 0 3.93 2017
author: Lyanda Lynn Haupt
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> 25664449
Johnson argues that learning to see the world afresh, like a child, shifts the way we think about Instead of something distant and abstract, nature becomes real—all at once comical, annoying, and beautiful. This shift can add tremendous value to our lives, and it might just be the first step in saving the world.

No matter where we live—city, country, oceanside, or mountains—there are wonders that we walk past every day. Unseen City widens the pinhole of our perspective by allowing us to view the world from the high-altitude eyes of a turkey vulture and the distinctly low-altitude eyes of a snail. The narrative allows us to eavesdrop on the comically frenetic life of a squirrel and peer deep into the past with a ginkgo biloba tree. Each of these organisms has something unique to tell us about our neighborhoods and, chapter by chapter, Unseen City takes us on a journey that is part nature lesson and part love letter to the world’s urban jungles. With the right perspective, a walk to the subway can be every bit as entrancing as a walk through a national park.]]> 224 Nathanael Johnson 1623363853 Audacia 0 to-read 4.01 2016
author: Nathanael Johnson
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> 52593940
Clocks, compasses, GPS, and Google can only get us so far. In this special collection, lifelong wanderer and New York Times –bestselling author Tristian Gooley walks us through, book-by-book, the near-forgotten art of examining nature’s signs and patterns. Gooley begins to teach the singular way he senses signs in the wild that most people overlook in How to Read Nature. In The Natural Navigator, he shows how to find our way by the stars, rivers, clouds, and more. And New York Times bestseller How to Read Water is Gooley’s deep dive into everything from puddles to the sea, teaching navigators at any experience level to hear the whispers of water. Also a��waterproof pocket field notebook to kick-start your own adventures! This comprehensive set ]]> 896 Tristan Gooley 1615197443 Audacia 0 to-read 4.29
author: Tristan Gooley
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.29
book published:
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]]> 216520757
With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby �� gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer �� not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.]]> 128 Amber Dawn 1551529793 Audacia 0 to-read 4.71
author: Amber Dawn
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.71
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]]> 962851
Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes from Australia hitchhike to Hawaii in the landing gear of airliners; disruptive European zebra mussels, riding in ships' ballast water, are infiltrating aquatic ecosystems across the United States; parasitic flies from the U.S. prey on Darwin's finches in the Galapagos. Predatory American jellyfish in Russia; toxic Japanese plankton in Australia; Burmese pythons in the Everglades-biologists refer fearfully to "the homogenization of the world" as alien species jump from place to place and increasingly crowd native and endangered species out of existence. Never mind bulldozers and pesticides: the fastest-growing threat to biological diversity may be nature itself.

Out of Eden is a journey through this strange and shifting landscape. The author tours the front lines of ecological invasion--in Hawaii, Tasmania, Guam, San Francisco; in lush rainforests, through underground lava tubes, on the deck of an Alaska-bound oil tanker--in the company of world-class scientists. Wry and reflective, animated and richly reported, Out of Eden is a search both for scientific answers and for ecological authenticity.]]> 324 Alan Burdick 0374219737 Audacia 0 to-read 3.82 2005
author: Alan Burdick
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 31849793 186 Thomas R. Biebighauser 0983455813 Audacia 0 to-read 5.00
author: Thomas R. Biebighauser
name: Audacia
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216911073 A powerful exploration of race and swimming by a writer who “see[s] the world whole, allowing daily intimacies against a backdrop of social injustice�� (New York Times).

Michael Kleber-Diggs and his twin brother, Martin, grew up in Kansas City, their family part of a prosperous community of Black medical professionals. Their father had never learned to swim, so when he wanted to buy a boat, their mother, a former lifeguard, agreed on the condition that her sons take swimming lessons. Then their father was murdered in an act of random violence, and everyone’s lives changed—but for Michael, in the years and moves that followed, swimming remained a constant.

My Weight in Water��is the intimate memoir of a swimmer. It is a story of race and recreation in America—of segregation, desegregation, and justice—told through one family and their lives in the Midwest. It is a reckoning with the concept of self-care and a plea for joy. Most of all, it is a book about what it means to love an activity that leaves you vulnerable—your mostly unclothed body in close proximity to other mostly unclothed bodies, moving through the same water—when you are marked as an outsider by both your race and your size.

Transparently and gloriously written,��My Weight in Water��is a definitively American work about what it costs one swimmer to enter the pool and why he does it anyway—imagining a future where all people have access to an activity that renders us weightless.]]> Michael Kleber-Diggs 1954118724 Audacia 0 to-read 0.0
author: Michael Kleber-Diggs
name: Audacia
average rating: 0.0
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]]> 210277340 People live by their stories—how can we use them to accelerate action on climate change? ��

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples, exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant—of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics—she brings readers into the daily rhythms and intimacies of scientific research and political negotiation.

��

Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, and a constant juggler of the many roles and responsibilities of professional moms, Henderson’s eclectic, unconventional essays range from observations, confessions, and meditations on lab and fieldwork to a packing list for a trip to the State Capitol and a lactation diary. Readers are invited on voyages as far afield as the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, and a meteor crater in Ghana—and as close to home as a town hall meeting in America’s corn belt.

��

A love letter to science and a bracing (and sometimes hilarious) portrait of the many obstacles women, mothers, and people digging for truth navigate, Core Samples illuminates the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions. Bringing us behind the closed doors of discovery and debate, Henderson exposes the flaws in research institutions, the halls of government, and the role of science in policy, yet she shows how each crack is also an invitation for camaraderie, creativity, and change.]]> 208 Anna Farro Henderson 1517916046 Audacia 0 to-read 4.31
author: Anna Farro Henderson
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> 212068862
Creature Needs is a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat loss that harnesses the power of literature and scientific research to move us, and stir our hearts and minds, toward action and change. A collection of new literary works by prominent writers paired with excerpts from recent scientific articles that inspired and informed them, this innovative anthology engages the collaborative, cross-disciplinary spirit and energy that is necessary to address the impact of humans on all other animals on our planet.

Divided into six sections representing the basic needs for survival—air, food, water, shelter, room to move, and each other—the stories and poems in Creature Needs vividly portray how these essential conditions are under assault through climate change, habitat loss, plastic and industrial pollution, and human intervention in natural landscapes. As the dominant species on Earth, humans not only control access to survival resources but we also overconsume and harm them. Rather than surrender to despair, the writers here believe that we have the power, if we choose, to change course and protect these resources.

A collaboration with the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve, Creature Needs is a path-setting fusion of literary art and scientific research that deepens our understanding of the interdependence between life and habitat, illuminating the stark choices we face to conserve resources and ensure that the basic needs of all species are met.

Contributors: Kazim Ali, Mary-Kim Arnold, Ramona Ausubel, David Baker, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, Kimberly Blaeser, Oni Buchanan, Tina Cane, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Thalia Field, Ben Goldfarb, Annie Hartnett, Sean Hill, Hester Kaplan, Donika Kelly, Robin McLean, Miranda Mellis, Rajiv Mohabir, Kyoko Mori, David Naimon, Craig Santos Perez, Beth Piatote, Rena Priest, Alberto Ríos, Eléna Rivera, Sofia Samatar, Sharma Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Maggie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Tim Sutton, Jodie Noel Vinson, Asiya Wadud, Claire Wahmanholm, Marco Wilkinson, Jane Wong.]]> 184 Christopher Kondrich 1517918316 Audacia 5 3.78
author: Christopher Kondrich
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, climate, futures, read-in-2025
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]]> 218460347 A darkly comic and warm-hearted novel about an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush—bringing together his adult daughter, two orphaned kids, and a cat who can predict death—from the beloved author of Rabbit Cake and Unlikely Animals

At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.

But when PJ reads an obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.

Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also figures he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter, adrift in her 20s, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.

This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a second shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.]]> 384 Annie Hartnett 0593873440 Audacia 0 to-read 4.43 2025
author: Annie Hartnett
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 216247526 'It's time we name our kingdom!' he shouted over the wind. 'I say we call this place Happy Land. If this ain't the land of happy people, then where is it? Why not create our heaven right here on earth?'

In the hills of Appalachia, there once existed a land ruled by a king and queen. Inspired by memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom on mountain land they owned. But freedom doesn't always last forever . . .

Today, after years of silence, Nikki has been summoned to North Carolina by her estranged grandmother. But instead of revealing answers about their recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki a shocking story about her great-great-great grandmother, Queen Luella, and the very land they stand on. Land Mother Rita insists must be protected at all costs.

As Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, she comes to realise how much of her identity is rooted in this family land, and how much they stand to lose if it, like so much else, is taken from them. It's time to reclaim what's theirs.]]> 368 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 0593337727 Audacia 0 to-read 4.42 2025
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 223435444 118 Clara Bush Vadala 1942004818 Audacia 0 to-read 0.0
author: Clara Bush Vadala
name: Audacia
average rating: 0.0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 123022380
Meena has only just escaped her abusive husband, but her resistance to remarry soon gives way to the promise of stability and companionship that Baadal offers. Together, they leave the Town in search of greater fortunes in the City. But even strong-willed, independent Meena finds herself bowed by the strain of Badaal’s punishing work schedule, her struggling beauty parlor, and the tension with Baadal’s mother, Raheela, who fights for control of her son as she seeks to leave behind a life of disappointments and discover a freedom she’s never known.

Told in rotating perspectives spanning from 1966 to 1998, THE RIVER, THE TOWN is an intimate portrait of a family unraveling in the throes of indigence, and a tribute to the wounded love that keeps them tethered to each other. With stark and candid prose, Farah Ali traces one family’s fortunes to illuminate the relentless cycle of inequity, juxtaposing the tragic and grueling realities of poverty with the enduring struggle for compassion and humanity.]]> 216 Farah Ali 1950539881 Audacia 0 to-read 3.67 2023
author: Farah Ali
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 200350645 224 Kate J. Neville 1682832031 Audacia 0 to-read 4.00
author: Kate J. Neville
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 39088985
Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone , biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us -- prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again.]]> 336 Rob Dunn 1541645766 Audacia 4 4.20 2018
author: Rob Dunn
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: adventure, animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, climate, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 22929598 An exquisite and intimate novel about four people’s lives and our changing relationship with nature—for fans of Jon McGregor and Robert Macfarlane.

Howard and Kitty have been married for thirty years and now sleep in different rooms. It was always Kitty’s dream to move from their corner of north London into the countryside, and when the kids had left home they moved north, to the pretty village of Lodeshill with its one ailing pub and outlying farms. Howard often wonders if anyone who lives in this place really has a reason to be there—more reason than him.

Jack was once a rural rebel, a protestor who only ever wanted to walk the land in which he had been born, free and subject to nobody. After yet another stint in prison for trespass, he sets off once more to walk north up the country’s spine with his battered old backpack and notebooks full of scribbled poetry, looking for work in the fields and sleeping under the stars.

Jamie is a nineteen-year-old Lodeshill boy who works in a distribution center and has a Saturday job at a bakery. He spent his childhood exploring the woods and fields with his grandfather, and playing with his friend Alex, who lived in the farmhouse next door. Now, though, all he dreams of is cars—and escape.

As the lives of these four people overlap, we realize that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them, but also locked into the landscape. A captivating novel, At Hawthorn Time is about what it means to belong—to family, to community, and to place—and about what it is to take our own, long road into the unknown.]]> 288 Melissa Harrison 1620409941 Audacia 0 to-read 3.69 2015
author: Melissa Harrison
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45869112 From National Book Award in Fiction finalist Andrew Krivak comes a gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants and a girl's journey home.

In an Eden-like future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They own a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches his daughter how to fish and hunt and the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.]]> 224 Andrew Krivak 1942658702 Audacia 0 to-read 3.86 2020
author: Andrew Krivak
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> 49374466 In an endless winter, she carries seeds of hope

Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty—her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she’s been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented extreme winter.

With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. After a harrowing encounter with a violent cult, Wylodine and her small group of exiles become a target for its volatile leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow.

Urgent and poignant, Road Out of Winter is a glimpse of an all-too-possible near future, with a chosen family forged in the face of dystopian collapse. With the gripping suspense of The Road and the lyricism of Station Eleven, Stine’s vision is of a changing world where an unexpected hero searches for a place hope might take root.]]> 315 Alison Stine 0778309924 Audacia 0 to-read 3.64 2020
author: Alison Stine
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60145000
NPR Science Friday Book Club Selection An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future.

From award-winning writer Leila Philip, BEAVERLAND is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers .
��
Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer��.
��
What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, BEAVERLAND reveals the profound ways in which one odd��creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment.]]> 336 Leila Philip 153875519X Audacia 5 3.69 2022
author: Leila Philip
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, library-reads, nature-wildness-food-farms, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Audacia 0 to-read 3.70 2025
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207003759 Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature—the eel—a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business. What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world’s most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels—as unagi—are another delicious. In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of “eel people,�� pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed “elvers�� caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long “Operation Broken Glass.�� Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America’s first commercial eel “family farm,�� which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.]]> 304 Ellen Ruppel Shell 141976585X Audacia 0 3.74
author: Ellen Ruppel Shell
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.74
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, read-in-2025
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 Audacia 0 to-read 3.35 2025
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 192723639 176 Ada Limon 1571315683 Audacia 5 4.04 2024
author: Ada Limon
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, poetry, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 61286570 406 Stephen Moss 1783352418 Audacia 0 to-read 3.97 2023
author: Stephen Moss
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210040073 In this inspiring culmination of Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s life’s work as botanist, biochemist, biologist and poet of the global forest, she delivers a challenge to us all to dig deeper into the science of forests and the ways they will save us from climate breakdown—and then do our part to plant and protect them.As the last child in Ireland to receive a full Druidic education, Diana Beresford-Kroeger has brought an unusual and ancient holistic attitude to the science of trees, which has led her to many fresh insights into how closely we are tied to one another and to the natural world. Her influential message is to pay rapt attention to trees, because they are the green heart of the living world. Forests are our lungs, our medicine, our oxygen and the renewal of our soil. Planting the right trees in the right places, protecting the last virgin forests and working to create new ones is our best means to ensure a future for our children and grandchildren on this burning earth.Each of the essays gathered in Our Green Heart show us a slice of the natural world through Diana’s unique lens, illuminating the way our health, individually and as a species, is tied to the health of the forest—a tie we ignore at our peril. She maps the science that still needs to be done—there is so much we don’t know about the ways trees and forests work—but also, eloquently, shows us the path to survival that her own science has revealed, the “bioplan�� or blueprint for the connectivity of life in nature. If we realize that even the flowerpot on our doorstep is a natural habitat, and plant it according to its bioplan, we will be aiding and abetting life rather than destroying it.]]> 216 Diana Beresford-Kroeger 1039009794 Audacia 0 to-read 4.16
author: Diana Beresford-Kroeger
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199798280
Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science.

The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating great art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible, obsessed with trying to outdo his rival, Alexander Wilson. George Ord, a fan and protégé of Wilson, held a bitter grudge against Audubon for years, claiming he had faked much of his information and his scientific claims. A few of Audubon’s birds were pure fiction, and some of his writing was invented or plagiarized. Other naturalists of the era, including Charles Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon), John Townsend, and Thomas Nuttall, also became entangled in the scientific derby, as they stumbled toward an understanding of the natural world—an endeavor that continues to this day.

Despite this intense competition, a few species—including some surprisingly common songbirds, hawks, sandpipers, and more—managed to evade discovery for years. Here, renowned bird expert and artist Kenn Kaufman explores this period in history from a new angle, by considering the birds these people discovered and, especially, the ones they missed. Kaufman has created portraits of the birds that Audubon never saw, attempting to paint them in that artist’s own stunning style, as a way of examining the history of natural sciences and nature art. He shows how our understanding of birds continues to gain clarity, even as some mysteries persist from Audubon’s time until ours.]]> 400 Kenn Kaufman 1668007592 Audacia 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Kenn Kaufman
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 67354038 272 Katty Baird 0008474060 Audacia 0 to-read 4.20
author: Katty Baird
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 127282239
The need to understand and conserve biodiversity has never been more pressing. This is particularly urgent for vulnerable ecosystems such as islands, which have suffered human-caused extinctions throughout history and recent prehistory.

A tale of exciting scientific discovery, The Tomb of the Mili Mongga is based on the story of expeditions to the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia. Writer Samuel Turvey discovers an entire recently extinct mammal fauna from the island's fossil record, revealing how islands support some of the world's most remarkable biodiversity, and why many endemics are threatened with extinction.

But as the story unfolds, a new narrative emerges �� Sumba's indigenous communities tell of a mysterious wildman called the mili mongga, a giant yeti-like beast that supposedly lives in the island's remote forests. What is behind the stories of the mili mongga? Is there a link between this enigmatic entity and the fossils Sam's looking for? And what did he discover when he finally found the grave of a mili mongga?

The Tomb of the Mili Mongga combines evolution, conservation, anthropology, travel writing and cryptozoology to explore the traditional culture and unique biodiversity of a tropical island that's largely unknown to the outside world, with wider questions about the relationship between biodiversity and cultural diversity, what reality means from different cultural perspectives, and how folklore, fossils and biodiversity conservation can be linked together in surprising ways.]]> 304 Samuel T. Turvey 1399409778 Audacia 0 to-read 3.85
author: Samuel T. Turvey
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443826
In Kingdom of Play , critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution?

Monkeys belly-flop, dolphins tail-walk, elephants mud-slide, crows dive-bomb, and octopuses bounce balls. These activities are various, but all are play, and as Toomey explains, animal play can be seen as a distinct behavior—one that is ongoing and open-ended, purposeless and provisional—rather like natural selection. Through a close examination of both natural selection and play, Toomey argues that life itself is fundamentally playful.

A globe-spanning journey and a scientific detective story filled with lively animal anecdotes, Kingdom of Play is an illuminating—and yes, playful—look at a little-known aspect of the animal kingdom.]]> 304 David Toomey 1982154462 Audacia 0 to-read 3.72
author: David Toomey
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195088560 285 Simon Barnes 1398518913 Audacia 0 to-read 3.99
author: Simon Barnes
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.99
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195790579
Marcia Bjornerud’s life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world. As one of few women in her field, she witnessed the shift in our understanding of the Earth, from solid object to an entity in a constant state of transformation. In the most tumultous times of her own life, a deep understanding of our rocky planet imbued her life with meaning.

The lives of rocks are long and complex, spanning billions of years and yet shaping our own human lives in powerful, invisible ways. Sandstone that filters out pathogens creating underground oases in aquifers of clean water. Ecologite is “the chosen rock�� whose formation keeps the planet running. Earth is not just a passive backdrop, or a source of resources to be mined, extracted, and carved out. Rocks are full of wisdom, but somewhere along the way many of us have forgotten how to hear it.

When we are uncertain about where to find truth, a geocentric worldview reminds us that we are Earthlings, part of a planetary community where we can wisdom in the most unlikely places.]]> 320 Marcia Bjornerud 1250875897 Audacia 0 to-read 4.23 2024
author: Marcia Bjornerud
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 26195972 ��
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
��
"A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation." - Wall Street Journal
��
Legends don't come close to capturing the incredible story of the coyote. In the face of centuries of campaigns of annihilation employing gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Alaska to New York. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down. Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this extraordinary animal, from its origins to its apotheosis. It is one of the great epics of our time.]]> 271 Dan Flores 0465052991 Audacia 4 4.08 2016
author: Dan Flores
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, read-in-2016, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 22571538 One woman reclaims her sense of wonder by seeking out the globe’s most incredible natural phenomena

Heartfelt and awe inspiring, Leigh Ann Henion’s Phenomenal is a moving tale of physical grandeur and emotional transformation, a journey around the world that ultimately explores the depths of the human heart. A journalist and young mother, Henion combines her own conflicted but joyful experiences as a parent with a panoramic tour of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders.

Phenomenal begins in hardship: with Henion deeply shaken by the birth of her beloved son, shocked at the adversity a young mother faces with a newborn. The lack of sleep, the shrinking social circle, the health difficulties, all collide and force Henion to ask hard questions about our accepted wisdom on parenting and the lives of women.Convinced that the greatest key to happiness—both her own and that of her family—lies in periodically allowing herself to venture into the wider world beyond home, Henion sets out on a global trek to rekindle her sense of wonder.

Henion’s quest takes her far afield, but it swiftly teaches her that freedom is its own form of parenting, one that ultimately allows her to meet her son on his own terms: with a visceral understanding of the wonder he experiences every day at the fresh new world. Whether standing on the still-burning volcanoes of Hawai’i or in the fearsome lightning storms of Venezuela, in the vast animal movements of Tanzania or the elegant butterfly migrations of Mexico, Henion reveals in Phenomenal a world of sublimity and revelation.

Henion’s spiritual wanderlust puts her in the path of modern-day shamans, reindeer herders, and astrophysicists. She meets laypeople from all over the world, from all walks of life, each going to great lengths to chase migrations, auroras, eclipses, and other phenomena. These seekers trust their instincts, follow their passions, shape their days into the lives they most want to lead. And somewhere along the way, Leigh Ann Henion becomes one of them.

A breathtaking memoir, Phenomenal reveals unforgettable truths about motherhood, spirituality, and the beauty of nature.
]]> 288 Leigh Ann Henion 1594204713 Audacia 0 3.72 2015
author: Leigh Ann Henion
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, library-reads, memoir, read-in-2025
review:

]]> 63850269 “A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity.�� �� Kirkus



Thomas C. Gannon’s��Birding While Indian��spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.



Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl��and��his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.



��]]> 255 Thomas C. Gannon 0814258727 Audacia 0 to-read 4.10
author: Thomas C. Gannon
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443901 A compelling global exploration of nature and survival as seen via a dozen species of trees that represent the challenges facing our planet, and the ways that scientists are working urgently to save our forests and our future.

The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history—from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively in the ways they do. In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world's most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats.

Lewis takes us on a sweeping journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the deep jungles of Peru, to offer a globe-spanning perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet. When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? And how can science account for the survival of one species at the expense of others? To study the science of trees is to study not just the present, but the story of the world, its past, and its future.

Note—species include: * The Lost Tree of Easter Island (Sophora toromiro) * The coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) * Hymenaea protera [a fossil tree] * The Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) * East Indian sandalwood (Santanum album) * The Bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) * West African ebony (Diospyros crassiflora) * The Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) * Olive tree (Olea europaea) * Baobab (Adansonia digitata) * The kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) * The bald cypress (Taxodium distichum)]]> 304 Daniel Lewis 1982164050 Audacia 0 read-in-2025 3.95 2024
author: Daniel Lewis
name: Audacia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: read-in-2025
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]]> 194803881
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.]]> 291 Amy Tan 0593536134 Audacia 5 4.06 2024
author: Amy Tan
name: Audacia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: animals-and-natural-history, audiobook, library-reads, read-in-2025
review:

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