Lydia's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 27 Dec 2024 07:17:36 -0800 60 Lydia's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Lydia 3 audiobooks, library-books 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/16
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: audiobooks, library-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[MUSIC BY MY BEDSIDE EBK (Turkish Literature)]]> 16175880
On the eve of a coup d’etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend. Having married more for status than love, and quizzically unmoored from the reality of day-to-day existence in the capital, she begins to nurse an impossible love for her husband’s superior, and in the process of telling us of her Bovary-like, novelistic infatuation, she confesses innumerable details of her her tomboyish school years, her independence and ambitions as a young woman, her surprise at her own willingness to set aside her aspirations to enter the comfortable world represented by her husband. Set against the backdrop of the great cultural changes occurring in Turkey during the 1960s, Music by My Bedside is a compelling and often playful journey through one woman’s off-kilter view of herself, the world, and the conventions by which she is constrained.]]> 382 Kür?at Ba?ar 1564788334 Lydia 0 to-read 3.20 2003 MUSIC BY MY BEDSIDE EBK (Turkish Literature)
author: Kür?at Ba?ar
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lives We Left Behind 58488194 265 Olivia Bratherton-Wilson Lydia 0 to-read 4.27 2021 The Lives We Left Behind
author: Olivia Bratherton-Wilson
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan]]> 56993592 Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying. --The French Review

In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker's disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn't relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel's work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.]]> Tanguy Viel 162897382X Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.67 2013 The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan
author: Tanguy Viel
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Darkest Legacy (The Darkest Minds, #4)]]> 37688046
Determined to clear her name, Zu finds herself in an uncomfortable alliance with Roman and Priyanka, two mysterious Psi who could either help her prove her innocence or betray her before she gets the chance. But as they travel in search of safety and answers, and Zu grows closer to the people she knows she shouldn't trust, they uncover even darker things roiling beneath the veneer of the country's recovery. With her future-and the future of all Psi-on the line, Zu must use her powerful voice to fight back against forces that seek to drive the Psi into the shadows and save the friends who were once her protectors.

From #1 New York Times best-selling author Alexandra Bracken comes a harrowing story of resilience, resistance, and reckoning that will thrill loyal fans and new readers alike.]]> 569 Alexandra Bracken 136802324X Lydia 5 4.09 2018 The Darkest Legacy (The Darkest Minds, #4)
author: Alexandra Bracken
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/08/25
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
review:
Alex, we both know that wasn't a stand-alone. Just give me more.
]]> There There 43076988 292 Tommy Orange 0525436146 Lydia 0 to-read 4.05 2018 There There
author: Tommy Orange
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Where I End 204294822 At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Sometimes in the morning we find her in places. We never see her move. We just come upon her.

Aoileann is cursed. She has no friends, never gone to school. She has never left this windswept craggy isle off the coast of Ireland.

Her mother is cursed: a silent wreck Aoileann calls the “bed-thing.� Alongside her grandmother, Aoileann’s days are an endless monotony of feeding, changing, and caring for the bed-thing.

Their island seems cursed, whispering secrets only Aoileann hears. Then Rachel, a vivacious artist from the mainland, arrives with her colicky newborn. Rachel arouses yearnings Aoileann cannot fully comprehend. Soon, the unfolding of her mother’s secret tragedy and Aoileann’s pursuit of her own dark desires are both destined to unleash a maelstrom upon all three of their lives.]]> 256 Sophie White 1645661857 Lydia 0 to-read 3.67 2022 Where I End
author: Sophie White
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[World After (Penryn & the End of Days, #2)]]> 12983100 Angelfall, the survivors of the angel apocalypse begin to scrape back together what's left of the modern world.

When a group of people capture Penryn's sister Paige, thinking she's a monster, the situation ends in a massacre. Paige disappears. Humans are terrified. Mom is heartbroken.

Penryn drives through the streets of San Francisco looking for Paige. Why are the streets so empty? Where is everybody? Her search leads her into the heart of the angels' secret plans where she catches a glimpse of their motivations, and learns the horrifying extent to which the angels are willing to go.

Meanwhile, Raffe hunts for his wings. Without them, he can't rejoin the angels, can't take his rightful place as one of their leaders. When faced with recapturing his wings or helping Penryn survive, which will he choose?]]> 438 Susan Ee Lydia 4 4.24 2013 World After (Penryn & the End of Days, #2)
author: Susan Ee
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2014/08/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Archive of Alternate Endings]]> 42770439 The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold.

In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg’s sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can’t come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy.

Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.]]> 159 Lindsey Drager 1945814829 Lydia 0 to-read 4.09 2019 The Archive of Alternate Endings
author: Lindsey Drager
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Bookshelf)]]> 205901828

The Nile brought them life, but the Nile was not their friend.

When a little boy drowns in the treacherous currents of the Nile, the search for his body unearths calamity and disaster, and exposes forgotten secrets buried for generations in a small northern Sudanese village.

Three women try to make their way through a world that wants to keep them back, separated from each other by time but bound together by the same river that weaves its way through their lives, giving little but taking much more.

A Mouth Full of Salt uncovers a country on the brink of seismic change as its women decide for themselves which traditions are fit for purpose � and which prophecies it's time to rewrite.

‘Lively and engaging …Gaafar’s village characters are vivid and skilfully drawn � A Mouth Full of Salt gives up its secrets slowly, a trait that only enhances the reading pleasure of this intricate jewel of a novel.�
New Internationalist

�A Mouth Full of Salt skillfully recounts the nuanced history of two countries that were divided long before they had any say in the matter. Gaafar approaches this narrative with compassion, confronting uncomfortable truths head-on.�
The New Arab

‘Compelling � Gaafar’s medical and scientific training contribute to the novel’s remarkably organic descriptions, as well as some of the themes that Gaafar addresses � whether they have to do with women’s health issues, or the clash between science and tradition.�
The Africa Report

‘Gaafar tells the intertwined stories of three women who are confronted with injustice. A conversation about responsible writing, role models and the forgotten war in Sudan.�
Qantara

‘A riveting debut novel .. A Mouth Full of Salt captivates from the first line with its intoxicating mix of high intrigue, socio-political commentary and (post)colonial history.�
Afropean Magazine

‘A stunning, powerful story of a community in the north of Sudan, struck by calamity and loss.�
Samia Aziz]]> 256 Reem Gaafar 086356772X Lydia 0 to-read 4.12 2024 A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Bookshelf)
author: Reem Gaafar
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine]]> 23461003 That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials� particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.

An intelligent and madly entertaining novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass, Alexandra Kleeman's unforgettable debut is a missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and, above all, a wholly singular vision of modern womanhood by a frightening, "stunning" (Conjunctions), and often very funny voice of a new generation.]]> 304 Alexandra Kleeman 0062388673 Lydia 0 to-read 3.25 2015 You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
author: Alexandra Kleeman
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Little Luck 75582270
Not fully understanding her own reasons for going back to the place where she once lived and raised a family, and that she had been determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps her return is nothing more than a little luck…]]> 211 Claudia Piñeiro 1913867552 Lydia 0 currently-reading 4.31 2015 A Little Luck
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> How High We Go in the Dark 57850265
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.]]> 293 Sequoia Nagamatsu 0063072645 Lydia 3
PS. There is a particularly bizarre part where a Japanese woman describes her high school uniform as a "Sailor Moon-style uniform". Hmm???]]> 3.81 2022 How High We Go in the Dark
author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves:
review:
Mediocrity is not a crime. This collection is mediocre in just about every way, from the prose to its hopepunk ideas. The stories being interconnected was distracting and confusing, though I do like how the last story tied it all together. It could have been close to a 4 star read had the weaker stories (like half) been dropped. But I still would've probably described it as mediocre.

PS. There is a particularly bizarre part where a Japanese woman describes her high school uniform as a "Sailor Moon-style uniform". Hmm???
]]> Between Two Moons 62049712 A deeply moving family story about identity, faith, and belonging set in the Muslim immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate from high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, and his mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.

Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know whom to trust?]]> 336 Aisha Abdel Gawad 0593467825 Lydia 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Between Two Moons
author: Aisha Abdel Gawad
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> People in the Room 40679931 A young woman in Buenos Aires spies three women in the house opposite her family’s home. Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences.

Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth-century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognised in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.

]]> 176 Norah Lange 1911508237 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.43 1950 People in the Room
author: Norah Lange
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/15
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Thirst 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

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

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

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.43 2020 Thirst
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Crooked Plow 120855172 Heralded as the most important Brazilian novel of the century so far, this bestseller's unique blend of magic and social realism won it three literary awards and global acclaim

'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.'

Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.]]> 288 Itamar Vieira Junior 1839766425 Lydia 4 translated 4.18 2019 Crooked Plow
author: Itamar Vieira Junior
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/11
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves: translated
review:

]]> The Bone Fire 23874519 482 György Dragomán 0544527216 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.70 2014 The Bone Fire
author: György Dragomán
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Ada's Room 61387987 A kaleidoscopic novel spanning generations and continents, that reveals the connections between four women all fighting for survival.

A woman in 15th century Ghana named Ada buries her child and confronts a Portuguese enslaver. A woman in Victorian England named Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius based on the only child of Lord Byron, tries to hide her affair with Charles Dickens from her husband. A woman named Ada, imprisoned in a camp brothel at Buchenwald in 1945, will survive one more day. Connected by an unknown but sentient spirit, and a bracelet of fertility beads that each Ada encounters at a pivotal moment in her life, these women share a name and a fight.

As their interwoven narratives converge on a modern day Ada, a young Ghanian woman who finds herself pregnant, alone, in Berlin, searching for a home before her baby arrives, their shared spirit will find a way to help her break the vicious cycle of injustice.

This novel is a feat of imagination and breaks down simplistic notions of history as a straight line; one woman's experience matters to another's 400 years later, on a different continent. In this deeply moving, at times mordantly funny, ultimately hopeful book, there is a connection between all those fighting for love, for family, for justice, for a home.]]> 352 Sharon Dodua Otoo 0593539796 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.24 2021 Ada's Room
author: Sharon Dodua Otoo
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/09
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Simple Art of Killing a Woman]]> 128713530 The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.]]> 272 Patrícia Melo 1632063468 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.22 2019 The Simple Art of Killing a Woman
author: Patrícia Melo
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/09
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> The Eighth House 207607585 In the archives of the national library, a researcher named Linda sees a nine year-old girl's face in the pages of a yellowed newspaper, and the seed of an obsession is planted in her mind. Birgitta Sivander was brutally murdered one night in May 1948. The culprit was never found. Linda feels a deep connection to Birgitta, and in the months that follow she compulsively researches the case. Meanwhile, a life is taking root inside Linda; she is to have a daughter of her own. As she grapples with the wonder and anxiety of motherhood, she gradually pieces together Birgitta's story, closing in on the possible killer. Driven to redeem a lost child, Linda must find a way to lay Birgitta to rest. Moving and unputdownable, The Eighth House is a shattering examination of why cycles of violence persist, and an invocation of the hope that new life brings.]]> 315 Linda Segtnan Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.88 2022 The Eighth House
author: Linda Segtnan
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/06
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam]]> 64394112
We had Samira Azzam (1927�1967) for far too few years, and we never got to read what she would do with a novel. Still, she did leave us with five vivid short-story collections, as well as reviews, articles, translations, and countless hours of broadcast radio. Yet after her death, her work fell into a half-shadow, in which she was acknowledged as great, but not quite canonized. In a 2018 article on the Palestinian short story, the critic Faisal Darraj says it “Azzam has not yet received the accolades she deserves.�

This translated collection -- full of her vivid snapshots of life in Palestine and Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century -- is a start at giving Samira Azzam a few of the accolades she deserves.]]> 215 Samîra Azzâm Lydia 0 to-read 4.25 Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam
author: Samîra Azzâm
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Mustache 1725958 146 Emmanuel Carrère 0020188706 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.79 1986 The Mustache
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/06
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Last Words from Montmartre 18465930 Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s پé, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.]]> 176 Qiu Miaojin 1590177258 Lydia 0 It won't be a great work of art, but it could be a book of true purity; the detailed, thorough excavation of one very small field of a young person's life.

I will not be rating a suicide note.]]> 3.90 1996 Last Words from Montmartre
author: Qiu Miaojin
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves:
review:
It won't be a great work of art, but it could be a book of true purity; the detailed, thorough excavation of one very small field of a young person's life.


I will not be rating a suicide note.
]]> <![CDATA[The River Between (Penguin African Writers Series)]]> 22571513 A powerful novel by the great Kenyan author and Nobel Prize contender—the latest in the Penguin African Writers Series

A legendary work of African literature, this moving and eye-opening novel lucidly captures the drama of a people and culture whose world has been overturned. The River Between explores life in the mountains of Kenya during the early days of white settlement. Faced with a choice between an alluring new religion and their own ancestral customs, the Gikuyu people are torn between those who fear the unknown and those who see beyond it.]]> 148 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 0143107496 Lydia 0 to-read 3.85 1965 The River Between (Penguin African Writers Series)
author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Affections 32920269
Inspired by real events, Affections is the story of the eccentric, fascinating Ertl clan, headed by the egocentric and extraordinary Hans, once the cameraman for the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Shortly after the end of World War II, Hans and his family flee to Bolivia to start over. There, the ever-restless Hans decides to embark on an expedition in search of the fabled lost Inca city of Paitití, enlisting two of his daughters to join him on his outlandish quest into the depths of the Amazon, with disastrous consequences.

Set against the backdrop of the both optimistic and violent 1950s and 1960s, Affections traces the Ertls’s slow and inevitable breakdown through the various erratic trajectories of each family member: Hans’s undertakings of colossal, foolhardy projects and his subsequent spectacular failures; his daughter Monika, heir to his adventurous spirit, who joins the Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known as “Che Guevara’s avenger�; and his wife and two younger sisters left to pick up the pieces in their wake. In this short but powerful work, Hasbún weaves a masterfully layered tale of how a family’s voyage of discovery ends up eroding the affections that once held it together.]]> 142 Rodrigo Hasbún 1501154796 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.47 2015 Affections
author: Rodrigo Hasbún
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Confrontations 133939077 A bold, unsettling, surprisingly tender debut novel for readers of Nightcrawling and fans of I May Destroy You.

Salomé Atabong is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, living in the Netherlands. She arrives at a juvenile detention center to start a six-month sentence for a violent crime, which she did commit but does not regret. Expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies, Salomé refuses to atone. But even if Salomé could get home, it would be no refuge: her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, and her elder sister Miriam’s main preoccupation is to get out of the village as soon as possible.

After months in the prison system, she realizes she must come to terms with her anger, sorrow, and guilt, as well as the crime she has committed and the real reason behind her rage.

Raw, unsentimental, but lyrically written, Confrontations captures the paradoxical demands society makes on Black women, the way communities, schools, and the prison system perpetuate racism, and the cost of Black female defiance.]]> 192 Simone Atangana Bekono 1639730915 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.47 2020 Confrontations
author: Simone Atangana Bekono
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> In the Belly of the Congo 61169958 368 Blaise Ndala 1635422590 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.22 2021 In the Belly of the Congo
author: Blaise Ndala
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Search Sweet Country 1156022 308 Kojo Laing 057112996X Lydia 0 to-read 3.71 1986 Search Sweet Country
author: Kojo Laing
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Invisibility Cloak 28588169 An NYRB Classics Original

The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don’t ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins?

This provocative and seriously funny exercise in the social fantastic by the brilliantly original Ge Fei, one of China’s finest living writers, is among the most original works of fiction to come out of China in recent years. It is sure to appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and other fabulists of contemporary irreality.]]> 126 Ge Fei 1681370204 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.81 2012 The Invisibility Cloak
author: Ge Fei
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Satantango 11455485 Satantango is proof that “the devil has all the good times.�

The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,� George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.�

“You know,� Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”]]> 274 László Krasznahorkai 0811217345 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.19 1985 Satantango
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Assassin's Apprentice (Farseer Trilogy, #1)]]> 77197
Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Fitz, son of Chivalry Farseer, is a royal bastard, cast out into the world, friendless and lonely. Only his magical link with animals - the old art known as the Wit - gives him solace and companionship. But the Wit, if used too often, is a perilous magic, and one abhorred by the nobility.

So when Fitz is finally adopted into the royal household, he must give up his old ways and embrace a new life of weaponry, scribing, courtly manners; and how to kill a man secretly, as he trains to become a royal assassin.]]> 435 Robin Hobb 055357339X Lydia 0 to-read 4.21 1995 Assassin's Apprentice (Farseer Trilogy, #1)
author: Robin Hobb
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)]]> 41161350
In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family, and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed. The fledgling community provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to "make America great again." In an increasingly divided and dangerous nation, Lauren's subversive colony--a minority religious faction led by a young black woman--becomes a target for President Jarret's reign of terror and oppression.

Years later, Asha Vere reads the journals of a mother she never knew, Lauren Olamina. As she searches for answers about her own past, she also struggles to reconcile with the legacy of a mother caught between her duty to her chosen family and her calling to lead humankind into a better future.]]> 406 Octavia E. Butler Lydia 4 4.35 1998 Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> My Life in the Bush of Ghosts 1169073 174 Amos Tutuola 0802131050 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.77 1954 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
author: Amos Tutuola
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> The Dark Side of Skin 131574949 202 Jeferson Tenório 1913867730 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.29 2020 The Dark Side of Skin
author: Jeferson Tenório
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Love 57946470
A literary sensation in Israel, Maayan Eitan’s incendiary debut set off a firestorm about the relationship between truth and fiction, and the experiences of women under the power of men. Compact and gemlike, this is a contemporary allegory of a young woman on the verge.]]> 112 Maayan Eitan 0593299698 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.19 2020 Love
author: Maayan Eitan
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> The Secret Talker 50212157 Combining the dark twists of The Silent Patient with the unsettling beauty of The Vegetarian, a tense, gripping, and wholly original psychological tale of a woman with a secret admirer—who is hiding secrets of her own.

Beautiful, diligent, and passive, Hongmei is the perfect wife to Glen, an intelligent and caring college professor. But her quiet life in Northern California fractures when a mysterious person begins e-mailing her, pulling her into an enthralling and frightening game of cat-and-mouse. Who is stalking her? And how does this mysterious stranger know her deepest, darkest secrets?

As Hongmei is forced to confront her own dark past in China, the façade of her idyllic life is laid bare. Increasingly desperate and self-destructive, her one hope is to turn the tables on her tormentor. Investigating the stalker’s own secret history may irrevocably tear her marriage and her world apart—a risk she must take to regain control of her life.]]> 160 Geling Yan 0063004038 Lydia 0 to-read 2.96 2004 The Secret Talker
author: Geling Yan
name: Lydia
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Girl, Woman, Other 41081373
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.]]> 453 Bernardine Evaristo 0241364906 Lydia 4 4.27 2019 Girl, Woman, Other
author: Bernardine Evaristo
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem]]> 89526
As history and fantasy merge, Maryse Condé, acclaimed author of Tree of Life and Segu, creates the richly imagined life of a fascinating woman.]]> 225 Maryse Condé 0345384202 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.03 1986 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
author: Maryse Condé
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> A Good Happy Girl 185767237 A poignant, surprising, and immersive read about a young professional woman pursuing an emotionally intense relationship with a married lesbian couple.

Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize� distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant—Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity.

Perceptive and attentive, Catherine and Katrina prod at Helen’s life, revealing a childhood tragedy she’s been repressing. When her father begs her yet again for help getting parole, she realizes that she has a bargaining chip to get answers to her past.

In her exploration of queer domesticity, effects of incarceration on family, and intergenerational poverty, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who don’t often receive it, with unsettling results.]]> 256 Marissa Higgins 1646221974 Lydia 0 to-read 2.91 2024 A Good Happy Girl
author: Marissa Higgins
name: Lydia
average rating: 2.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy]]> 199798061 Featuring a new introduction by Ken Liu, this revised edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first full-length collection of essays covers her background as a writer and educator, on fantasy and science fiction, on writing, and on the future of literary science fiction.

“We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks to the language of the night.� —Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator. The book and each thematic section are brilliantly introduced and contextualized by Susan Wood, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a literary editor and feminist activist during the 1960s and �70s.

A fascinating, intimate look into the exceptional mind of Le Guin whose insights remain as relevant and resonant today as when they were first published.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin 1668034905 Lydia 0 to-read, nonfic 4.37 1979 The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read, nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Observable Universe: An Investigation]]> 179546805 A moving memoir of a young woman's reckoning with her parents' absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyper-connected world

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. Orphaned by age ten, she was raised by her grandmother in Los Angeles, a fragmented city, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, unmoored by grief, she begins exploring the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss. This leads her to discover that AIDS and the internet developed along parallel timelines, lending truth to the saying "going viral." Chasing this idea through anecdotes, TV shows, scientific papers, Wikipedia entries, and internet history, McCalden forms a synaptic experience of what happened to her family, one that leads to an unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been.]]> 304 Heather McCalden 0593596471 Lydia 0 to-read 3.84 2024 The Observable Universe: An Investigation
author: Heather McCalden
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Piglet 127282554 A New York Times Book Review Editors� Choice
A Belletrist Book Club Pick

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.]]> 320 Lottie Hazell 125028984X Lydia 0 to-read 3.40 2024 Piglet
author: Lottie Hazell
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Death Valley 199798092
In Melissa Broder’s astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike.

Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.

Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is “a journey unlike any you’ve read before� (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black ).]]> 256 Melissa Broder 1668024861 Lydia 0 to-read 3.40 2023 Death Valley
author: Melissa Broder
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Lydia 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)]]> 62919748 At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets in this new fantasy series by internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington.

AUDI. VIDE. TACE.

The Catenan Republic � the Hierarchy � may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus � what they call Will � to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.]]> 630 James Islington 1982141174 Lydia 0 to-read 4.63 2023 The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)
author: James Islington
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Beartown (Beartown, #1) 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]> 432 Fredrik Backman Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.27 2016 Beartown (Beartown, #1)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us]]> 55361614
A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day, condemned to death, and thrown into a cell to await the guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians.

But what if the militant is a “pied-noir�? What if his lover was a member of the French Resistance? What happens to a “European� who chooses the side of anti-colonialism?

By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as “vibrantly lyrical and somber� and by the journal La Croix as a “masterpiece�.]]> 144 Joseph Andras 1788738713 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.37 2016 Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us
author: Joseph Andras
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Ghachar Ghochar 30267604
Elegantly written and punctuated by moments of unexpected warmth and humor, Ghachar Ghochar is a quietly enthralling, deeply unsettling novel about the shifting meanings—and consequences—of financial gain in contemporary India.]]> 118 Vivek Shanbhag 014311168X Lydia 3 translated 3.89 2013 Ghachar Ghochar
author: Vivek Shanbhag
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/14
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: translated
review:
I was bored but it pulled me back with that cunty little ending damn
]]> The Great Undoing 204886311 In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade.

Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe. Befriended by a stranger, she grabs an old, faded history book and writes her own version over the top—a record of the Great Undoing on the run.

But in deciding what truth to tell Scarlet must face her own history. How do we navigate identity when it is all a lie? She must reckon with her past before she can imagine her future.]]> 304 Sharlene Allsopp 1761151665 Lydia 0 to-read 3.88 The Great Undoing
author: Sharlene Allsopp
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> Mater 2-10 61921635 International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story � an epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history.

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, MATER 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation’s longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that depicts reflect the lives of modern industrial workers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career � a masterpiece thirty years in the making. A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the grief of a divided nation and bringing to life the cultural identity and trials and tribulations of the Korean people.]]> 486 Hwang Sok-yong 1913348954 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.65 2020 Mater 2-10
author: Hwang Sok-yong
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Undiscovered 70240502 An award-winning Peruvian journalist and international writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough work, blending fact and fiction in a genre-bending story of love, desire, heritage, and racism haunted by the specter of colonialism and absent fathers.

In 1878, the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener prepares to be heralded by the scientific community at the Exposition Universelle. The magnificent fair of “technological advances� numbers among its attractions a human zoo; it is ultimately a display of the peak of scientific racism and the European imperialist project. Wiener's exhibited pedigree: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a child.

A century and half later, when Gabriela Wiener visits the museum that houses the Wiener collection, she recognizes herself in the brown faces of the ceramic vessels her great-great-grandfather pillaged. Distraught over converging personal crises—the discovery of her bastard lineage, the death of her father, and the revelation of his second secret family—Gabriela embarks on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago and hopefully make it whole again. Her quest leads her to trace the footprints of her family's founder, an illegitimate family lineage shared by many others, and to confront the inheritance of identity itself.

Written in the spirit of haunting emotional works of reckoning by Carmen Maria Machado and Ayad Ahktar, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one’s own desire.

Translated by Julia Sanches]]> 192 Gabriela Wiener 0063256681 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.28 2021 Undiscovered
author: Gabriela Wiener
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Not a River 195790859
A hot, motionless afternoon. Enero and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend’s teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray’s enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness. It’s only the two sisters―the teenage nieces of one of the locals, Aguirre―with their hair black as cowbird feathers and giving off the scent of green grass, who are curious about the trio and invite them to a dance. But the girls are not quite as they seem. As night approaches and tensions rise, Enero and El Negro return to the charged memories of their friend who years ago drowned in this same river.

As uneasy and saturated as a prophetic dream, Not a River is another extraordinary novel by Selva Almada about masculinity, guilt, and irrepressible desire, written in a style that is spare and timeless.]]> 104 Selva Almada 1644452855 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.75 2020 Not a River
author: Selva Almada
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> 貹í 51658555 貹í se alza como firme candidata a ser la gran novela sobre la agonía de Venezuela y el hundimiento del chavismo.

Muestra del caos y la penuria que identifican Caracas son la legión de perros que recorren sus calles, abandonados por los millones de venezolanos que huyen del país. Por eso Ulises, un tipo sin oficio ni beneficio que imparte clases en un modesto taller de cine, acepta la misión de crear una fundación dedicada a rescatar perros desamparados. Sin saberlo, Ulises va a ser arrastrado por una odisea de enredos familiares, peligros que le llevan a dudar de su entorno –donde de repente nadie es lo que parece� y de enigmas que atañen a los perros más insignes y patriotas de la historia de Venezuela.]]> 272 Rodrigo Blanco Calderón 8420439371 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.45 2020 貹í
author: Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Time Shelter 58999261
In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a “time shelter”—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter announces Gospodinov to American readers as an essential voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1324090952 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.59 2020 Time Shelter
author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Europe Underdeveloped Africa]]> 40630 The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism and its negative consequences for Africa spring mainly from the fact that Africa lost power. Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one's interests and if necessary to impose one’s will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which a people survive as a physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment.
Before a bomb ended his life in the summer of 1980, Walter Rodney had created a powerful legacy. This pivotal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, had already brought a new perspective to the question of underdevelopment in Africa. his Marxist analysis went far beyond the heretofore accepted approach in the study of Third World underdevelopment. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an excellent introductory study for the student who wishes to better understand the dynamics of Africa’s contemporary relations with the West.]]> 312 Walter Rodney 0882580965 Lydia 0 4.42 1971 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
author: Walter Rodney
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves: nonfic, currently-reading, audiobooks, library-books
review:

]]> The Island of Missing Trees 56587382 A rich, magical new book on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited -- her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.]]> 354 Elif Shafak 0241434998 Lydia 0 dnf
This is one of those books where, by reading the first sentence, you can comfortably guess where the next sentence will go. The same goes for predicting what happens in the next chapter.
Something about the writing style was so rhythmic and uniform that it felt too neat, irritating in a way.
This feels like a book a woman my mom's age would enjoy. A pedestrian women's historical fiction novel. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I expected it to be, considering it being lauded and awarded as if it pushed any sort of boundary.]]> 4.13 2021 The Island of Missing Trees
author: Elif Shafak
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: dnf
review:
DNF about 120pgs in

This is one of those books where, by reading the first sentence, you can comfortably guess where the next sentence will go. The same goes for predicting what happens in the next chapter.
Something about the writing style was so rhythmic and uniform that it felt too neat, irritating in a way.
This feels like a book a woman my mom's age would enjoy. A pedestrian women's historical fiction novel. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I expected it to be, considering it being lauded and awarded as if it pushed any sort of boundary.
]]> Kibogo 61953598
When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.

Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.

To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?]]> 152 Scholastique Mukasonga 1953861369 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.95 2020 Kibogo
author: Scholastique Mukasonga
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> The Singularity 200805699 identity � when once her family fled a distant war.

Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a study of grief, migration and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting new novelists.]]> 184 Balsam Karam 1804270814 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.77 The Singularity
author: Balsam Karam
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Out of Earth 194928617 First translation into English of Desesterro, the multiple prize-winning novel by Sheyla Smanioto first published in Brazil, 2015

This remarkable Brazilian novel has been garlanded with multiple awards and accolades since its initial publication, as Desesterro: the prestigious SescPrize for Literature, the Machado de Assis award and the Jabuti award. The story follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertão. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is Half-Formed Thing.]]> 252 Sheyla Smanioto 1913861201 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.29 2015 Out of Earth
author: Sheyla Smanioto
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Beastings 53023862 Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers' Award

'A brilliant, brutal novel' ROBERT MACFARLANE

A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England.

When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.]]> 222 Benjamin Myers 152661121X Lydia 0 to-read 4.17 2014 Beastings
author: Benjamin Myers
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ask the Passengers 13069935
As her secret relationship becomes more intense and her friends demand answers, Astrid has nowhere left to turn. She can't share the truth with anyone except the people at thirty thousand feet, and they don't even know she's there. But little does Astrid know just how much even the tiniest connection will affect these strangers' lives--and her own--for the better.

In this truly original portrayal of a girl struggling to break free of society's definitions, Printz Honor author A.S. King asks readers to question everything--and offers hope to those who will never stop seeking real love.]]> 304 A.S. King 0316194689 Lydia 3 3.84 2012 Ask the Passengers
author: A.S. King
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/02
date added: 2024/03/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Riambel 62344367 Par une succession de vignettes, Priya Hein évoque une adolescence passée à la frontière entre deux univers�: celui des créoles du bidonville et des ti lakaz , et celui des Blancs qui habitent les maisons de maître. Lorsque Noémie est à son tour amenée à travailler chez les Grandbourg, à l’aube de ses seize ans, elle effleure pour la première fois un monde auquel elle n’appartiendra jamais et où elle se brûlera les ailes.]]> 208 Priya Hein 2383611409 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.00 2022 Riambel
author: Priya Hein
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/29
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> La bastarda 32496013 117 Trifonia Melibea Obono 8494601806 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.54 2016 La bastarda
author: Trifonia Melibea Obono
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/29
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Fruit of the Dead 176443312
Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.

Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s own late capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.]]> 320 Rachel Lyon 1668020858 Lydia 0 to-read 3.50 2024 Fruit of the Dead
author: Rachel Lyon
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age]]> 20763766 Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today � about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.]]> 192 Cory Doctorow 1940450284 Lydia 0 3.98 2014 Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
author: Cory Doctorow
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: library-books, audiobooks, dnf
review:

]]> Wandering Souls 127282384 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction 2024
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

�Wandering Souls is a poetic, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant celebration of the human spirit. Casting well-known history in new light, Pin offers a capacious rendering of the love, loss, and hope of migration. Stunning and unforgettable.� —Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country

There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.

After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned. Reckoning with survivor’s guilt, the siblings are unmoored by their parents� absence. After a twist of fate lands the trio in Britain, their paths diverge further with every choice they’re forced to make, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.

Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by loss yet relentlessly pursuing a better future. It affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.]]> 240 Cecile Pin 1250863481 Lydia 0 to-read 4.13 2023 Wandering Souls
author: Cecile Pin
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hunger of Women 125483242 256 Marosia Castaldi 1913505863 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.50 The Hunger of Women
author: Marosia Castaldi
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 41161349
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' pain.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith...and a startling vision of human destiny.

This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale� (John Green, New York Times)—now with a new foreword by N. K. Jemisin.]]> 329 Octavia E. Butler 1538732181 Lydia 3 4.17 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves:
review:
I feel bad giving this a 3 star rating, but I have to be honest: It doesn't really stand on its own? I'll have to give the sequel a try and see if they work better as a unit.
]]> The Postcard 63880836 Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.]]> 464 Anne Berest Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.31 2021 The Postcard
author: Anne Berest
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> No One Writes Back 17591572 No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book, traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on the road. Rather than learn the names of his fellow travelers—or even invent nicknames for them—he assigns them numbers. There's 239, who once dreamed of being a poet, but who now only reads her poems to a friend in a coma; there's 109, who rides trains endlessly because of a broken heart; and 32, who's already decided to commit suicide. The narrator writes letters to these men and women in the hope that he can console them in their various miseries, as well as keep a record of his own experiences: "A letter is like a journal entry for me, except that it gets sent to other people." No one writes back, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some hope that one of them will, someday...]]> 203 Jang Eun-Jin 1564789608 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 4.25 2009 No One Writes Back
author: Jang Eun-Jin
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> The Virgin Suicides 11321374 243 Jeffrey Eugenides 0307401928 Lydia 0 dnf
where's the flavor]]> 3.74 1993 The Virgin Suicides
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: dnf
review:
DNF - 100 pages in

where's the flavor
]]> Crimson 37760563
In modern day Nuuk, Greenland, four friends explore their queer identities.

Fia breaks up with her long term boyfriend, and falls for Sara.

Sara is in love with Ivik who is about to break her heart with a deep secret.

Iviq struggles with gender dysphoria, and transgender identity, as the rest of the young adults on Nuuk become addicted to Facebook, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in bars and at house parties.

Then there's Inuk, with a secret too - something that will take him to limits of madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing these five lives to a shocking crescendo.]]> 208 Niviaq Korneliussen Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.40 2014 Crimson
author: Niviaq Korneliussen
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Biography of X 127278790
"A major novel, and a notably audacious one." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"It feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X , Catherine Lacey somehow―magically―makes the nearly impossible look easy." ―Lauren Groff

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X―an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter―falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey 1250321689 Lydia 0 to-read 3.88 2023 Biography of X
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Middlesex 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Lydia 3 gender 4.03 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves: gender
review:
I never saw this much incest in the old country
]]> Cuckoo 61884778 Cuckoo is a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell.

Something evil is buried deep in the desert.
It wants your body. It wears your skin.

In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face-to-face with it. They survived � but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person.

Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it’s too late.

The fate of the world depends on it.]]> 342 Gretchen Felker-Martin 1250794668 Lydia 0 to-read 3.52 2024 Cuckoo
author: Gretchen Felker-Martin
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis]]> 22318476 Award-winning journalist Sam Anderson’s long-awaited debut is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City--a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny.

Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team's 2012-13 season, when the Thunder's brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti's all-in gamble on "the Process"—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city's history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed.

Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.]]> 428 Sam Anderson 0804137315 Lydia 0 4.37 2018 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis
author: Sam Anderson
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves: audiobooks, library-books, dnf
review:

]]> Living Things 195468033 116 Munir Hachemi 1804270881 Lydia 0 to-read, translated 3.81 Living Things
author: Munir Hachemi
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/09
shelves: to-read, translated
review:

]]> Woman at Point Zero 159604 108 Nawal El Saadawi Lydia 4 translated 4.21 1975 Woman at Point Zero
author: Nawal El Saadawi
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/08
date added: 2024/02/08
shelves: translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 58191443
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 192 Benjamín Labatut 1681375664 Lydia 0 to-read 4.25 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World
author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Lydia 3 3.89 2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
author: Mark Haddon
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Bluets 6798263 Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.]]> 112 Maggie Nelson 1933517409 Lydia 0 4.09 2009 Bluets
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/01/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Phoebe's Diary 61102828
Drawn from real life, here is a bracingly honest illustrated diary of a teenage girl that captures the explosive turmoil and joy of adolescence.

Meet Phoebe. She’s cool and insecure, talented and vulnerable, sexy and awkward, driven and confused, ecstatic and tragic.

Like you.

And here is her diary, packed full of invaluable friends and heartbreaking crushes, spectacular playlists and vintage outfits, drama nerds and art kids, old wounds and new love. Based on her own teenage diary, Phoebe Wahl has melded truth with fiction and art with text, casting a spell that brings readers deep into the experience of growing up.]]> 464 Phoebe Wahl 0316363561 Lydia 0 to-read 4.24 2023 Phoebe's Diary
author: Phoebe Wahl
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

A surreal and wryly humorous cultural critique, Diary of a Void is bound to become a landmark in feminist world literature.]]> 213 Emi Yagi 0143136879 Lydia 4 translated 3.51 2020 Diary of a Void
author: Emi Yagi
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/27
date added: 2024/01/27
shelves: translated
review:

]]> Zenobia 32805461 96 Morten Dürr 8770856443 Lydia 0 3.92 2018 Zenobia
author: Morten Dürr
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Chouette 56986846 An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis

Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,� she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.�

When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure� for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.

Arresting, darkly funny,andunsettling,Chouetteis a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.]]> 256 Claire Oshetsky 006306667X Lydia 4 gender i should probably call my mom 3.88 2021 Chouette
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/24
date added: 2024/01/24
shelves: gender
review:
i should probably call my mom
]]> Thirst for Salt 61340225 “A love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself.� ―Leslie Jamison It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait , he called me.

It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life. As their relationship deepens, life at Sailors Beach offers her the stability she has been craving as the daughter of two drifters―a loving but impulsive mother and an itinerant father. But the arrival of Maeve, a friend from Jude’s past, threatens to rock their fragile, newfound intimacy. And when she witnesses something she doesn’t fully understand, she finds herself questioning everything―about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants. A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt , reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.]]> 272 Madelaine Lucas 1953534651 Lydia 0 to-read 3.82 2023 Thirst for Salt
author: Madelaine Lucas
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City]]> 25852784 Evicted, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America's most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.]]> 418 Matthew Desmond 0553447432 Lydia 0 nonfic, dnf 4.47 2016 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves: nonfic, dnf
review:

]]> Goodbye Tsugumi 50146 186 Banana Yoshimoto 0571212794 Lydia 2 3.81 1989 Goodbye Tsugumi
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Between Two Moons 62049182 A deeply moving family story about identity, faith, and belonging set in the Muslim immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate from high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, and his mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.

Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know whom to trust?]]> 336 Aisha Abdel Gawad 0385548613 Lydia 0 to-read 3.89 2023 Between Two Moons
author: Aisha Abdel Gawad
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Trinity of Fundamentals 134928864 The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.
Love, revolution, and life—these are the “Trinity of Fundamentals'' that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.]]> 331 Wisam Rafeedie Lydia 0 to-read 4.56 The Trinity of Fundamentals
author: Wisam Rafeedie
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 193388249
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And this was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.]]> 338 David Grann 0593470834 Lydia 0 audiobooks, library-books 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/12
date added: 2024/01/12
shelves: audiobooks, library-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For]]> 49214560 416 Alison Bechdel 0358424178 Lydia 0 4.39 2008 The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/01/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Winter in Sokcho 52873922 As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author

It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.

The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an ‘authentic� Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows � the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.

An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.]]> 154 Elisa Shua Dusapin 1911547542 Lydia 4 translated 3.55 2016 Winter in Sokcho
author: Elisa Shua Dusapin
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: translated
review:

]]> How to Survive in the North 29633670
Luke Healy was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He received an MFA in Cartooning from The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. His comics work has been published in several anthologies and he has also worked as a coloring assistant with Lucy Knisley on her book Something New.
]]> 197 Luke Healy 1910620068 Lydia 2 3.61 2016 How to Survive in the North
author: Luke Healy
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> After Dark 17803 In After Dark—a gripping novel of late night encounters—Murakami’s trademark humor and psychological insight are distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.]]> 191 Haruki Murakami 0307265838 Lydia 4 3.75 2004 After Dark
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves:
review:
this man just fuckin loves jazz
]]> The Patron Saint of Liars 15957 352 Ann Patchett 1841150509 Lydia 0 to-read 3.81 1992 The Patron Saint of Liars
author: Ann Patchett
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The English Understand Wool 59468833 Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 Lydia 3 4.06 2022 The English Understand Wool
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves:
review:
get wes anderson on the phone, i got him a novella to adapt
]]> Monstrilio 196842128
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses―though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care―threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]> 336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638931607 Lydia 0 to-read 4.13 2023 Monstrilio
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Lydia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bliss Montage 60243188 A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages

What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.]]> 228 Ling Ma 0374293511 Lydia 4 3.91 2022 Bliss Montage
author: Ling Ma
name: Lydia
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves:
review:
need a college professor to untangle some of these for me, but i can tell ling ma was cooking
]]>