Karan's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 18 Apr 2025 04:00:08 -0700 60 Karan's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver]]> 34272476
“No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.� —The Washington Post

“It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.� —Chicago Tribune

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.

Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.]]> 456 Mary Oliver 0399563245 Karan 0 to-read 4.58 2017 Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
author: Mary Oliver
name: Karan
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2017
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> Lion 212808262 An engrossing work of autobiographical fiction about the relationship between an actress daughter and her larger-than-life father—the astonishingly assured debut novel of Sonya Walger, actress on Lost, For All Mankind, and more.

Lion, as his friends call him, is an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter’s life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina’s greatest earthquake,Lionis like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.

“It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child,� his daughter writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos, her, by turns, loving, maddening, and magnetic father.

Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.

Sonya Walger’s stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.]]> 176 Sonya Walger 1681379031 Karan 0 to-read 4.44 2025 Lion
author: Sonya Walger
name: Karan
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
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]]> Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Karan 0 to-read 3.69 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Karan
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

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

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Karan 0 to-read 4.33 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Karan
average rating: 4.33
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]]> Queer 10287367
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141189918]]> 150 William S. Burroughs Karan 0 to-read 3.39 1985 Queer
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Karan
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy]]> 52569124
Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how these emotional experiences influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships.

Polysecure is both a trailblaizing theoretical treatise and a practical guide. It provides nonmonogamous people with a new set of tools to navigate the complexities of multiple loving relationships, and offers radical new concepts that are sure to influence the conversation about attachment theory.]]> 268 Jessica Fern 1944934987 Karan 0 to-read 4.36 2020 Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
author: Jessica Fern
name: Karan
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> Katabasis 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Karan 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Karan
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
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]]> Love in Exile 60683642 ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human�

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.]]> 208 Shon Faye 0241605989 Karan 0 to-read 4.30 Love in Exile
author: Shon Faye
name: Karan
average rating: 4.30
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]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Karan 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Karan
average rating: 4.16
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]]> Naked Lunch 563798 Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth-century fiction.]]> 232 William S. Burroughs Karan 0 to-read 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Karan
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
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]]> Disappoint Me 218153678 An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

“Dinan writes like some kind of demigod. Her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live and what we might expect from each other.”� Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.]]> 320 Nicola Dinan 0593977874 Karan 0 to-read 4.17 2025 Disappoint Me
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Karan
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life]]> 14451357 A new edition of a celebrated contemporary work on race and racism

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft ought to be positioned, as Bookforum put it, at the center of any discussion of race in American life.

Most people assume racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call "racecraft." And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.]]> 310 Karen E. Fields 1844679942 Karan 0 to-read 4.15 2012 Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
author: Karen E. Fields
name: Karan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2012
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]]> <![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 Karan 0 to-read 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Karan
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Karan 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Karan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
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]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Karan 0 to-read 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Karan
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Hot Stew 54110441
Hot Stew is an insightful and ambitious novel about property, ownership, wealth and inheritance. It is about the place we occupy in society, especially women, and the importance placed on class and money. It doesn't shy away from asking difficult questions but does so with humour and intelligence.]]> 320 Fiona Mozley 1643751557 Karan 0 to-read 3.44 2021 Hot Stew
author: Fiona Mozley
name: Karan
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> Cherry 36521370
Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America.]]> 336 Nico Walker 178733094X Karan 0 to-read 3.47 2018 Cherry
author: Nico Walker
name: Karan
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
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]]> Between the World and Me 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 152 Ta-Nehisi Coates Karan 0 to-read 4.40 2015 Between the World and Me
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Karan
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
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]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Karan 0 to-read 4.51 2024 The Message
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name: Karan
average rating: 4.51
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]]> Someone Like Us 201102290
With Hannah and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.]]> 272 Dinaw Mengestu 0385350007 Karan 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Someone Like Us
author: Dinaw Mengestu
name: Karan
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]> 419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 Karan 0 to-read 4.16 2015 A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Karan
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
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date added: 2024/11/23
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]]> Ripe 62919394
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever-closer as the world around her unravels.

When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through a late-capitalist hellscape and offers an incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.]]> 288 Sarah Rose Etter 1668011638 Karan 5 with-luis 3.60 2023 Ripe
author: Sarah Rose Etter
name: Karan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: with-luis
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]]> <![CDATA[Late to the Search Party: Poems]]> 220161321 A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life.

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.]]> 96 Steven Espada Dawson 1668081563 Karan 0 to-read 4.70 Late to the Search Party: Poems
author: Steven Espada Dawson
name: Karan
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]]> Women's Hotel 199793688 From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women’s hotel in 1960s New York City.

The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.

The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they’d better make the most of it while it lasts.

As trenchant as the novels of Dawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women’s Hotel is a modern classic—and it is very, very funny.]]> 272 Daniel M. Lavery 0063343533 Karan 0 to-read 2.84 2024 Women's Hotel
author: Daniel M. Lavery
name: Karan
average rating: 2.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> Four Squares 199426316
Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.

Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.

Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.]]> 336 Bobby Finger 0593713559 Karan 0 to-read 3.97 Four Squares
author: Bobby Finger
name: Karan
average rating: 3.97
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]]> Tongue Party 11042163
It was selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition and is currently available from Caketrain Press.]]> 90 Sarah Rose Etter Karan 0 to-read 4.33 2011 Tongue Party
author: Sarah Rose Etter
name: Karan
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> The Book of X 43465812 The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.]]> 284 Sarah Rose Etter 1937512819 Karan 0 to-read 4.01 2019 The Book of X
author: Sarah Rose Etter
name: Karan
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> Kala 63184768 A gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent in which former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives.

In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They—Helen, Joe and Mush—were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot center. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now remains have been discovered in the woods—including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside—and the town is both aghast and titillated at reopening this old wound.

On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father’s wedding, the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic, and Mush had never left, too shattered by the events of that summer to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance. Ultimately, they must do what others should have done before to stop the violent patterns of their town’s past repeating themselves once again.

In cracklingly vivid prose, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.]]> 416 Colin Walsh 0385549636 Karan 0 to-read 3.96 2023 Kala
author: Colin Walsh
name: Karan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> Rosewater 62596601
Elsie is a sexy, funny, and fiercely independent woman in south London. But, at just 28, she is also tired. Though she spends her days writing tender poetry in her journal, her nights are spent working long hours for minimum wage at a neighborhood dive bar. Not even sleeping with her alluring coworker, Bea, can quell her existential dread. The difficulty of being estranged from her family, struggle of being continually rejected from jobs, and fear of never making money doing what she loves is too great. But Elsie is determined to keep the faith, for a little longer at least. Things will surely turn around. They have to.

But when Elsie is suddenly evicted from her social housing, her fragile foundations threaten to collapse entirely. With nowhere left to go, Elsie turns to her childhood friend, Juliet, for help.

Among Juliet’s mismatched cushions and shelves lined with trinkets, Elsie is able to breathe for the first time in years. But between their reruns of Drag Race and nights smoking on the balcony, something else soon begins to glimmer in Elsie’s heart . . . Sometimes what you’ve been searching for has been there all along. Can Elsie see it in time?

Featuring the incredible poetry of Kai-Isaiah Jamal, Rosewater is a story of intergenerational love, healing, and one woman’s journey home. A remarkable debut by an exciting new talent, readers are sure to be enchanted by Liv Little’s distinctive and captivating contemporary voice.]]> 320 Liv Little 1638930228 Karan 0 to-read 3.62 2023 Rosewater
author: Liv Little
name: Karan
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> Little Rot 202165946 A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning Akwaeke Emezi, about five friends trying to outrun and outmatch a powerful, underground world

One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A breakup that starts a spiral. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Little Rot is a whirling journey through the city’s dark side, told through the eyes of five people, each determined to run from the twisted powers out to destroy them.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt underworld, they’re all looking for a way out of the trouble they’ve instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals. Little Rot tests how far these five will go to save each other—or themselves—when confronted by evil, culminating in a shattering denouement.

With each novel, with each creation, Akwaeke Emezi shows their genius as a storyteller, as a visionary force who has created a thrilling tale of sex, power, and deviance in Little Rot. You won’t be able to look away.]]> 276 Akwaeke Emezi 0525541632 Karan 0 to-read 3.59 2024 Little Rot
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Karan
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Feast While You Can 207567782 For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, this strange and sexy novel of queer love in a small town is an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life are monsters ready to possess us all.

In the valley at the intersection of three towering mountains sits Cadenze, an ugly, remote town with little to its name. It's filled with tourists in the summer and dead the rest of the year, when most of its residents surrender to a sleepier existence. Except, that is, for whatever is lurking in the caves...

Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, and for many generations, so was every member of her family. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party much like every other, Angelina runs into Patrick's ex, the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. Perhaps enticed by Jagvi’s arrival, an ancient evil lying dormant in those caves is awakened, and soon Angelina’s small, contained world begins to shatter.

As the monstrous force grows bolder, it infiltrates Angelina’s life. It talks with her dog’s mouth; it guzzles on her memories; it controls Angelina from the inside. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it � the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak, and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?]]> 304 Mikaella Clements 153874225X Karan 0 to-read 3.89 2024 Feast While You Can
author: Mikaella Clements
name: Karan
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> Whale Fall 195888522 A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.]]> 224 Elizabeth O'Connor 0593700910 Karan 0 to-read 3.80 2024 Whale Fall
author: Elizabeth O'Connor
name: Karan
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End]]> 182095333
"A truly unique, inspiring perspective on the time we have, what we do with it, and how we let go of this world.... There is no one I'd trust more to guide me through an understanding of death, and how it informs life." � Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Mad Honey and The Book of Two Ways

"Briefly Perfectly Human is a beautiful, raw, light-bringing experience. Alua's voice is shimmering, singular, and pulses with humor, vulnerability, insight, and refreshing candor.... Be prepared for it to grab you, hold you tight, and raise the roof on the power of human connection." � Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.

Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients� anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.

This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.

Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.� Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,� Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”]]> 272 Alua Arthur 0063240033 Karan 0 to-read 4.19 2024 Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End
author: Alua Arthur
name: Karan
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Poor Artists: A Quest Into the Art World]]> 208931813 A moving, eye-opening journey through the world of contemporary art from one of the most innovative voices in the field

At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labelled “the Diet Prada of the art world� by British Vogue, in Poor Artists writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition.

Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question � including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight � The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.]]> 312 Gabrielle de la Puente 1802062521 Karan 4 4.44 2024 Poor Artists: A Quest Into the Art World
author: Gabrielle de la Puente
name: Karan
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> The Faculty Lounge 199605487 By the acclaimed author of Moxie, a funny, bighearted adult debut that is at once an ode to educators, a timely glimpse at today’s pressing school issues, and a tender character study, following a sprawling cast of teachers, administrators, and staff at a Texas high school

With its ensemble of warm and unforgettable characters, The Faculty Lounge shows readers a different side of school life. It all starts when an elderly substitute teacher at Baldwin High School is found dead in the faculty lounge. After a bit of a stir, life quickly returns to normal—it’s not like it’s the worst (or even most interesting) thing that has happened within the building’s walls. But when, a week later, the spontaneous scattering of his ashes on the school grounds catches the attention of somebusybody parents, it sets in motion a year that can only be described as wild, bizarre, tragic, mundane, beautiful, and humorous all at once.

In the midst of the ensuing hysteria and threats of disciplinary action, the novel peeks into the lives of the implicated adults who, it turns out, actually have first names and continue to exist when the school day is done. We a former punk band front man, now a middle-aged principal who must battle it out with the schoolboard to keep his job; a no-nonsense school nurse willing to break the rules, despite the close watch on their campus, when a student arrives at her office with a dilemma; and a disgruntled English instructor who finds himself embroiled in even more controversy when he misfires a snarky email. Oh, and there’s also a teacher make-out session in a supply closet during a lockdown.

As these people continue to manage the messiness of this school year, there is the looming threat of what will become of their beloved Baldwin High.Ultimately, at the heart of this unconventional workplace novel is a story of the power of human connection and of the joy of finding purpose in what it is we do every day.]]> 304 Jennifer Mathieu 0593475399 Karan 0 to-read 3.84 2024 The Faculty Lounge
author: Jennifer Mathieu
name: Karan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unlikely Village of Eden: A Memoir]]> 61911276 "A truly poignant read that shines a light on the humanity in neurodivergence, the heart of parenting, and the soul of psychotherapy.”—Adam Grant, #1New York Timesbestselling author ofThink Again

A profoundly thought-provoking, funny, and hopeful memoir about adapting when life doesn’t go to plan, redefining family, and creating your own path.



One afternoon, Emma Nadler gets a call from her daughter's doctor that changes her life forever. Faced with the realities of raising a child with a rare genetic condition, Nadler must confront her preconceptions of motherhood and her perfectionistic beliefs.

With a generous wit and a wide-open mind, Nadler—who also happens to be a psychotherapist—offers a rare window into the unconventional ways she and her family adapt to their improbable path. Every relationship in her life—with herself, her husband, children, friends, and even clients—is reimagined as she navigates the heartbreak and hilarity of her daily life.

As she and her husband join the 53 million caregivers in the United States, Nadler wrestles to belong in a society that devalues both caregivers and people with disabilities. She challenges the scripts that mothers should be martyrs, or that self-sacrifice is a necessary component of love. Nadler illustrates the complexity, grief, and joy of living an unexpected life, all with the wisdom of a therapist, the heart of a loving parent, and the ingenuity of a queer woman who refuses to be shackled by cultural expectations.


The Unlikely Village of Edenis an insightful and wholehearted look at the long-ignored realities so many families live with daily. Nadler is a trusted guide who confronts both hope and despair as she gives readers the gift of what it looks like to redefine love, success, family, and community.]]> 295 Emma Nadler 1949481824 Karan 0 to-read 4.35 The Unlikely Village of Eden: A Memoir
author: Emma Nadler
name: Karan
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> Linden Hills 34515018 The National Book Award–winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of “making it.� The ultimate a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become ... Using the descent of Dante’s Inferno as a model, this bold, haunting novel follows two young men as they attempt to find work amid the circles of the well-off community. Exploring a microcosm of race and social class, author Gloria Naylor reveals the true cost of success for the lost souls of Linden Hills—an existence trapped in a nightmare of their own making. ]]> 343 Gloria Naylor Karan 0 to-read 4.01 1985 Linden Hills
author: Gloria Naylor
name: Karan
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships]]> 49624060 How proteins, machine learning and molecular chemistry can teach us about the complexities of human behaviour and the world around us.

How do we understand the people around us? How do we recognise people's motivations, their behaviour, or even their facial expressions? And, when do we learn the social cues that dictate human behaviour?

Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her and the way people worked. Desperate for a solution, Camilla asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. But, without the blueprint to life, she was hoping for, Camilla began to create her own. Now armed with a PhD in biochemistry, Camilla dismantles our obscure social customs and identifies what it really means to be human using her unique expertise and a language she knows best: science.

Through a set of scientific principles, this book examines life's everyday interactions including:

- Decisions and the route we take to make them;
- Conflict and how we can avoid it;
- Relationships and how we establish them;
- Etiquette and how we conform to it.

Explaining Humans is an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in. Camilla's unique perspective of the world, in turn, tells us so much about ourselves - about who we are and why we do it - and is a fascinating guide on how to lead a more connected, happier life.]]> 239 Camilla Pang 0241409608 Karan 0 to-read 3.46 2020 Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships
author: Camilla Pang
name: Karan
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Trapped Tigers (Latin American Literature)]]> 223455 487 Guillermo Cabrera Infante 1564783790 Karan 0 to-read 3.96 2008 Three Trapped Tigers (Latin American Literature)
author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
name: Karan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> Poor 48645578 160 Caleb Femi 0141992158 Karan 0 to-read 4.45 2020 Poor
author: Caleb Femi
name: Karan
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Wickedest 208668860 'Atmospheric and intoxicating � The Wickedest is a heady night in the dance' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS

Caleb Femi returns with a landmark, life-affirming new poetry collection, The Wickedest.

This is a minute-by-minute depiction of a typical night at a legendary monthly house party known as 'The Wickedest'. Here, we meet a vivid cast of characters, young and old, all surfing a revelry steeped in camaraderie, community, desire and a spirit of jubilant defiance.

A modern epic, The Wickedest explores the institution of shoobs or house parties and their vital role within working-class communities. The poems range from classical English sonnets to experimental forms and are immersively interwoven with photographs, text messages and ephemera. The collection playfully dissembles parties � in space, sound, law and bureaucracy � to document the precarious existence of our nightlife venues.

In Caleb Femi's inimitable, cinematic style the book builds to a crescendo that is at once euphoric and grief-soaked. The Wickedest calls us to cast our minds to the moments we stood surrounded by our loved ones on a dancefloor, arms outstretched, and freed ourselves from the weight of reality to float.

'A joyous, lyrical read' YOMI ADEGOKE

'A near-holy experience' JONATHAN ESCOFFERY

'This is poetry that moves and is felt in the body' ANDREW MCMILLAN]]> 104 Caleb Femi 0008688230 Karan 0 to-read 4.06 2025 The Wickedest
author: Caleb Femi
name: Karan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Karan 0 to-read 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Karan
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> <![CDATA[As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow]]> 57390604
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.

But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.

Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.]]> 417 Zoulfa Katouh 0316351377 Karan 0 to-read 4.48 2022 As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
author: Zoulfa Katouh
name: Karan
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Karan 0 to-read 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Karan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> When to Pick a Pomegranate 210208648 80 Yasmeen Abedifard 8886200536 Karan 0 to-read 4.38 When to Pick a Pomegranate
author: Yasmeen Abedifard
name: Karan
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> Night Sky with Exit Wounds 30245389 Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects � love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire � and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.� This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.

‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.� Andrew McMillan]]> 93 Ocean Vuong Karan 0 to-read 4.05 2016 Night Sky with Exit Wounds
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Karan
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)]]> 23168277
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.]]> 371 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802123457 Karan 0 to-read 4.00 2015 The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Karan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/05
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]]> A Reason to See You Again 199531902
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.

Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.

But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.

Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.]]> 240 Jami Attenberg 0063039842 Karan 0 to-read 3.20 2024 A Reason to See You Again
author: Jami Attenberg
name: Karan
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/05
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]]> <![CDATA[See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love]]> 52626691
Kaur takes readers through her own riveting journey—as a brown girl growing up in California farmland finding her place in the world; as a young adult galvanized by the murders of Sikhs after 9/11; as a law student fighting injustices in American prisons and on Guantánamo Bay; as an activist working with communities recovering from xenophobic attacks; and as a woman trying to heal from her own experiences with police violence and sexual assault. Drawing from the wisdom of sages, scientists, and activists, Kaur reclaims love as an active, public, and revolutionary force that creates new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and our world. See No Stranger helps us imagine new ways of being with each other—and with ourselves—so that together we can begin to build the world we want to see.]]> 389 Valarie Kaur 0525509097 Karan 0 to-read 4.55 2020 See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
author: Valarie Kaur
name: Karan
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> The World Goes On 35439433 A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.

In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...'

The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.'

]]> 288 László Krasznahorkai 0811224201 Karan 0 to-read 3.51 2013 The World Goes On
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Karan
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> Audition 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Karan 0 to-read 3.53 2025 Audition
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Karan
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
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]]> Lote 59435615 384 Shola von Reinhold 1478018720 Karan 0 currently-reading 4.04 2020 Lote
author: Shola von Reinhold
name: Karan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Hot Springs Drive 122944244
She finds comfort in her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. The two navigate the trials of motherhood side by side � Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacquelyn with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacquelyn, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life by having an increasingly torrid affair with Theresa’s husband, Adam.

Hot Springs Drive is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and the lives she will destroy to satisfy them. In her third and fiercest novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.]]> 274 Lindsay Hunter 0802161456 Karan 0 to-read 3.43 2023 Hot Springs Drive
author: Lindsay Hunter
name: Karan
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> And Then He Sang a Lullaby 60714138 Theinaugural titlefromRoxane Gay Books,And Then He Sang a Lullabyisasearingly honest and resonant debut from a23-year-oldNigerian writer and queer liberation activist, exploring what love and freedom cost in a society steeped in homophobia.

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It’s his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends,doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There’s only one problem: he can’t stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé. Segun carries his own burdens and has been wounded in too many ways. When he meets August, their connection is undeniable, but Segun is reluctant to open himself up to August. He wants to love and be loved by a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who will see and hold and love Segun, exactly as he is.

Despite their differences, August and Segun forge a tender intimacy that defies the violence around them. But there is only so long Segun can stand being loved behind closed doors, while August lives a life beyond the world they’ve created together. And when a new, sweeping anti-gay law is passed, August and Segun must find a way for their love to survive in a Nigeria that was always determined to eradicate them. A tale of rare bravery and profound beauty,And Then He Sang a Lullabyis an extraordinary debut that marks Ani as a voice to watch.]]> 304 Ani Kayode Somtochukwu 080216076X Karan 5 queer-writing, with-luis 4.10 2023 And Then He Sang a Lullaby
author: Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
name: Karan
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: queer-writing, with-luis
review:
love is political, not social, political.
]]> Briefly, A Delicious Life 60749648
In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants.

Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing—a teenage ghost pining for a woman who can’t see her and doesn’t know she exists. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training).

Charming, original, and emotionally moving -- gorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and life after death.]]> 304 Nell Stevens 1982190965 Karan 0 to-read, queer-writing 3.83 2022 Briefly, A Delicious Life
author: Nell Stevens
name: Karan
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> Where There Was Fire 59808044 A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There was Fire.]]> 288 John Manuel Arias 1250817382 Karan 0 to-read 3.47 2023 Where There Was Fire
author: John Manuel Arias
name: Karan
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price]]> 208187033 Class Dismissed reveals the entrenched inequities that harm our most vulnerable students and what colleges can do to help them excelElite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. Class Dismissed exposes how woefully unprepared colleges were to support these students and shares their stories of how they were left to weather the storm alone and unprotected.Drawing on the firsthand experiences of students from all walks of life at elite colleges, Anthony Abraham Jack reveals the out-of-sight and unequal worlds students navigated before and during the pandemic closures and upon their return to campus. He shows how COVID-19 exacerbated the very inequalities that universities ignored or failed to address long before campus closures. Jack examines how students dealt with the disruptions caused by the pandemic, how they navigated social unrest, and how they grappled with problems of race both on campus and off.A provocative and much-needed book, Class Dismissed paints an intimate and unflinchingly candid portrait of the challenges of undergraduate life for disadvantaged students even in the elite schools that invest millions to diversify their student body. Moreover, Jack offers guidance on how to make students� path to graduation less treacherous—guidance colleges would be wise to follow.]]> 312 Anthony Abraham Jack 0691237468 Karan 0 to-read 3.99 Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price
author: Anthony Abraham Jack
name: Karan
average rating: 3.99
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date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> Ghost Season 61089464

Amid the paradoxes of identity, art, humanitarian aid, and a territory riven by conflict, William, Layla, Dena, Alex, and Mustafa must forge bonds stronger than blood or identity. Weaving a sweeping history of the breakup of Sudan into the lives of these captivating characters, Fatin Abbas explores the porous and perilous nature of borders—whether they be national, ethnic, or religious—and the profound consequences for those who cross them. Ghost Season is a gripping, vivid debut that announces Abbas as a powerful new voice in fiction.]]> 320 Fatin Abbas 1324001747 Karan 0 to-read 3.98 2023 Ghost Season
author: Fatin Abbas
name: Karan
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow]]> 199743690 Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad.

“You want to act like you don't know that everybody dey buy bumbum now?�

Freshly out of Obafemi Awolowo University, 20-year-old Temi has a clear plan for her she is going to surgically enlarge her backside like all the other Nigerian women, move from Ile-Ife to Lagos, and meet a man who will love her senseless. When she finally finds the courage to tell her mother, older sister, and aunties, her announcement causes an uproar. Nigerian families can really be an obstacle in a girl’s journey to physical perfection.

But as each of the other women try to cure Temi of what seems like temporary insanity, they begin to spill long-buried secrets, including the truth of Temi’s older sister’s mysterious disappearance five years earlier. In the end, it seems like Temi might be the sanest of them all�

In Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, Damilare Kuku brings her signature humor, boldness, and compassion to each member of this loveable but exasperating family, whose lives reveal the ways in which a woman’s physical appearance can dictate her life and relationships and show just how sharp the double-edged sword of beauty can be.]]> 272 Damilare Kuku 0063354497 Karan 0 to-read 3.60 2024 Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow
author: Damilare Kuku
name: Karan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Karan 0 to-read 4.38 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Karan
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science]]> 208580608 The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,� writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it. Grieving Pierre’s untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève’s later recollection, “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.�

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.]]> 318 Dava Sobel 0802163823 Karan 0 to-read 3.93 2024 The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science
author: Dava Sobel
name: Karan
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
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]]> A Bánh Mì for Two 200982340 In this sweet sapphic romance about two foodies in love, Vivi meets Lan while studying abroad in Vietnam and they spend the semester unraveling their families' histories—and eating all the street food in Sài Gòn.

In Sài Gòn, Lan is always trying to be the perfect daughter, dependable and willing to care for her widowed mother and their bánh mì stall. Her secret passion, however, is A Bánh Mì for Two, the food blog she started with her father but has stopped updating since his passing.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese American Vivi Huynh, has never been to Việt Nam. Her parents rarely talk about the homeland that clearly haunts them. So Vivi secretly goes to Vietnam for a study abroad program her freshman year of college. She’s determined to figure out why her parents left, and to try everything she’s seen on her favorite food blog, A Bánh Mì for Two.

When Vivi and Lan meet in Sài Gòn, they strike a deal. Lan will show Vivi around the city, helping her piece together her mother’s story through crumbling photographs and old memories. Vivi will help Lan start writing again so she can enter a food blogging contest. And slowly, as they explore the city and their pasts, Vivi and Lan fall in love.]]> 224 Trinity Nguyen 125091082X Karan 0 to-read 3.87 2024 A Bánh Mì for Two
author: Trinity Nguyen
name: Karan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> The Life Impossible 198281740
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…�

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.]]> 324 Matt Haig 0593489276 Karan 0 to-read 3.45 2024 The Life Impossible
author: Matt Haig
name: Karan
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Black Friend: Essays 56969544
Ziwe made a name for herself by asking guests like Alyssa Milano, Fran Lebowitz, and Chet Hanks direct questions. In Black Friend, she turns her incisive perspective on both herself and the culture at large. Throughout the book, Ziwe combines pop-culture commentary and personal stories, which grapple with her own (mis)understanding of identity. From a hilarious case of mistaken identity via a jumbotron to a terrifying fight-or-flight encounter in the woods, Ziwe raises difficult questions for comedic relief.

From Black Friend’s Introduction:

“Today, I learned that my book is ranked as the #1 new release in ‘Discrimination and Racism� on Amazon. Wow. This is a huge honor, especially considering my stiff competition in the selfpublished manifestos space. Unfortunately, this victory is bittersweet. I worry that people may get the wrong idea and think that I am pro-racism when in actuality, I am indifferent. Still, I’d love to thank everyone who made this possible. I solemnly swear to write the most discriminatory book in American history. I hope I can make you proud.

“Just kidding . . . I will not marginalize you . . . unless that’s your kink. This book of essays offers moments of extreme discomfort (and the subsequent growth) in my life around the role of ‘black friend.� Black friends come in all shapes and sizes. Yet the archetype is often a two-dimensional character meant to support the non-black protagonists� more complex humanity. Some black friends exist as the comic relief, like Donkey in any of the Shrek movies. Some are the sassy friend, like Louise from St. Louis in Sex and the City. Still others are the inexplicably sagacious companion, like Morpheus in The Matrix. It’s impossible for these individual portraits to reflect my complicated reality. To start, they are fictional. One of them is a talking ass. I do not exist just to move plot. While I am a supportive friend, I am not a supporting character. I am the protagonist of my perfectly imperfect story.”]]> 192 Ziwe 1419756346 Karan 0 to-read 4.26 2023 Black Friend: Essays
author: Ziwe
name: Karan
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Karan 5 3.77 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Karan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> The Great Divide 181110028
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

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

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

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 321 Cristina Henríquez 0063291320 Karan 4 3.62 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina Henríquez
name: Karan
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Rich People Have Gone Away]]> 201750876 343 Regina Porter 059324186X Karan 0 to-read 3.30 2024 The Rich People Have Gone Away
author: Regina Porter
name: Karan
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories]]> 199531878 240 Ruben Reyes Jr. 0063336278 Karan 0 to-read 4.10 2024 There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories
author: Ruben Reyes Jr.
name: Karan
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/26
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]]> Space Invaders 43317567 A dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s Chile

Space Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella González Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella’s braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella’s father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends—from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme—were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the “ghostly green bullets� they fired in the video game they played obsessively.

One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.]]> 96 Nona Fernández 1644450070 Karan 0 to-read 3.84 2013 Space Invaders
author: Nona Fernández
name: Karan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/24
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]]> How We Named the Stars 174070471
When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first―but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light.

But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? How is his own story connected to his late uncle’s? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward?

Equal parts tender and triumphant, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars is a debut novel of love, heartache, redemption, and learning to honor the dead; a story of finding the strength to figure out who you are―and who you could be―if only the world would let you.]]> 304 Andrés N. Ordorica 1959030337 Karan 0 to-read 4.00 2024 How We Named the Stars
author: Andrés N. Ordorica
name: Karan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/08/21
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]]> Model Home 205363963
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural� death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.]]> 304 Rivers Solomon 0374607133 Karan 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Model Home
author: Rivers Solomon
name: Karan
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Karan 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Karan
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

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

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

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Karan 0 to-read 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Karan
average rating: 3.98
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]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Karan 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Karan
average rating: 3.53
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]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Karan 0 to-read 3.93 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Karan
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay]]> 195820983
“There’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.�

Originally published in Essence magazine in the year 2000, Octavia E. Butler’s essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future� offers an honest look into the inspiration behind her science fiction novels and the importance of studying history and taking responsibility for our actions if we are to move forward.

Organized into four main rules, this short essay reminds readers to learn from the past, respect the law of consequences, be aware of their perspectives, and count on the surprises. Citing the warning signs of fascism, the illusive effects of fear and wishful thinking, and the unpredictable nature of what is yet to come, Butler shares realistic but hopeful suggestions to shape our future into something good. An inspiring and motivational gift for students and recent graduates, fans of Butler's work, and anyone seeking a brighter day tomorrow, this exquisite gift book includes stunning Afrofuturist artwork by Manzel Bowman alongside the full text of the original essay.

LITERARY Octavia E. Butler was a pioneering science fiction writer whose novels, written decades ago, remain eerily relevant, reflecting on themes of racial injustice, women’s rights, environmental collapse, and political corruption. In 1995, she became the first science fiction author to win a MacArthur Genius grant, and her books are taught in over 200 colleges and universities nationwide. This book shares Butler's timely but lesser-known essay and is a must-read for fans of her classic sci-fi works.

CELEBRATE BLACK This book spotlights one of the greatest authors of Afrofuturism, a genre and philosophy that explores and reimagines Black culture, creativity, and liberation through fiction, art, music, film, and other media. Octavia E. Butler’s forward-thinking essay is paired with contemporary illustrations by Manzel Bowman, whose evocative images are also inspired by Afrofuturist visions.

INSPIRING A unique gift for students, recent graduates, and anyone celebrating life milestones or looking forward in life, this beautifully designed hardcover book is sure to inspire. Octavia E. Butler’s essay is also an important, evergreen reminder for writers, creatives, dreamers, and activists who want to envision and work toward a brighter future.

Perfect ]]> 56 Octavia E. Butler 1797229052 Karan 0 to-read 4.34 2000 A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Karan
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2000
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date added: 2024/08/14
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]]> <![CDATA[I cannot be good until you say it]]> 202971659 The much-anticipated debut collection by the winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry a tender meditation on queerness and Islam

'Dissolving whatever boundaries would wall us off from love, Ahsan finds a way to let it all be holy' Victoria Adukwei-Bulley

'When I speak of the word "sacred", Sanah Ahsan's I cannot be good until you say it will forever instantly spring to mind ... A masterpiece - an honour to have read this book, I am forever changed after reading its beauty' Nikita Gill

'Innovative and deeply compassionate ... multilingual verse suffused with a vital musicality and a palpable tenderness, Ahsan calls poetry into prayer and evokes a faith safe enough to be mothered by' Mary Jean Chan

'Dexterous, varied, erotic, filled with rage, worships and wonder ... I am electrified' Pádraig Ó Tuama

'Tensions of psychological drama, together with an induced sense of yearning.. what an artful and inspired set of poems' Anthony Anaxagorou

'Liberation is at the nucleus of every page of Sanah Ahsan's rousing debut ... Ahsan is doing liberation work, offering readers a prayer, a song, a hand to hold amidst the amidst' Kaveh Akbar

'A remarkable and transformative collection' Keith Jarrett

'A daring debut collection, which guides us through the complexities of just being' Yomi Sode

'Alive with a want and restlessness that remakes the "You" of desire - and faith - again and again' Will Harris

'A heart punching debut collection' Raymond Antrobus
______________________________________________

Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah's poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure.

These poems traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, Whiteness, islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and spiritual are intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy.

How are we incarcerated by others' gazes? Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy? How might we embrace each other's madnesses? Sanah Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds. These poems kneel to the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence.

Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until you say it finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion.

This debut collection is a call to prayer, fearlessly complicating what is good, and what is god.]]> 104 Sanah Ahsan 1526665816 Karan 0 to-read 4.28 I cannot be good until you say it
author: Sanah Ahsan
name: Karan
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]]> <![CDATA[Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present]]> 202473205
Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk—the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world?

In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world—and created politics as we know it today. Next, the French Revolution, an explosive era that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us today. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Great Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world.

Alongside these paradigm-shifting historical events, Zakaria probes four present-day revolutions: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. For all their benefits, the globalization and technology revolutions have produced profound disruptions and pervasive anxiety and our identity. And increasingly, identity is the battlefield on which the twenty-first century’s polarized politics are fought. All this is set against a geopolitical revolution as great as the one that catapulted the United States to world power in the late nineteenth century. Now we are entering a world in which the US is no longer the dominant power. As we find ourselves at the nexus of four seismic revolutions, we can easily imagine a dark future. But Zakaria proves that pessimism is premature. If we act wisely, the liberal international order can be revived and populism relegated to the ash heap of history.

As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to once again reframe and illuminate our turbulent present. His bold, compelling arguments make this book essential reading in our age of revolutions.]]> 400 Fareed Zakaria 0393239233 Karan 0 to-read 4.12 2024 Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present
author: Fareed Zakaria
name: Karan
average rating: 4.12
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]]> <![CDATA[They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1)]]> 33385229
Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure—to live a lifetime in a single day.

Adam Silvera reminds us that there’s no life without death and no love without loss in this devastating yet uplifting story about two people whose lives change over the course of one unforgettable day.]]> 389 Adam Silvera 0062457799 Karan 0 to-read 3.76 2017 They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1)
author: Adam Silvera
name: Karan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/11
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]]> The Volcano Daughters 202468410 A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador’s brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren’t yet done telling their stories.

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country’s wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim at nine years old she’s been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator—a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She’ll help foresee the future of the country.

In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she’s never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator’s regime, but they’re no match for El Gran Pendejo’s cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she’s unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment.

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.]]> 368 Gina María Balibrera 0593317238 Karan 0 to-read 3.51 2024 The Volcano Daughters
author: Gina María Balibrera
name: Karan
average rating: 3.51
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]]> Burn 202102018 From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence

Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital.

But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men—secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell—as they seek a path to safety. Then, a startling discovery drastically alters their path and the stakes of their escape.

Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families.]]> 291 Peter Heller 0593801628 Karan 0 to-read 3.51 2024 Burn
author: Peter Heller
name: Karan
average rating: 3.51
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]]> <![CDATA[Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes]]> 127823320 A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: LA Times * Boston Globe * The Millions * LitHub

By the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning AFTERPARTIES comes a collection like none other: sharply funny, emotionally expansive essays and linked short fiction exploring family, queer desire, pop culture, and race

The late Anthony Veasna So’s debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a “bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon� (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker, and The Millions.

Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture, and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt’s illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief, and longing with inimitable humor and depth.

Following “one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years� (Vulture), Songs on Endless Repeat is an astonishing final expression by a writer of “extraordinary achievement and immense promise� (The New Yorker).]]> 240 Anthony Veasna So 0063049961 Karan 0 to-read 4.09 2023 Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes
author: Anthony Veasna So
name: Karan
average rating: 4.09
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]]> <![CDATA[Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams]]> 34466963 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501144318.

Neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night's sleep every night.]]> 368 Matthew Walker Karan 0 to-read 4.37 2017 Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
author: Matthew Walker
name: Karan
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2017
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]]> <![CDATA[Wanting: Women Writing About Desire]]> 61324695
What is desire? And what are its rules? In this daring collection, award-winning and emerging female writers share their innermost longings, in turn dismantling both personal and political constructs of what desire is or can be.

In the opening essay, Larissa Pham unearths the ache beneath all her wants: time. Rena Priest’s desire for a pair of five-hundred-dollar cowboy boots spurs a reckoning with her childhood on the rez and the fraught history of her hometown. Other pieces in the collection turn cultural tropes around dating, sex, and romance on their heads—Angela Cardinale tries dating as a divorced mother of two in the California suburbs only to discover sweet solace in being alone; Keyanah B. Nurse finds power in polyamory; and when Joanna Rakoff spots a former lover at a bar, the heat between them unravels her family as she is pulled into his orbit—an undoing, she decides, that’s worth everything.

Including pieces by Tara Conklin, Torrey Peters, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, and so many others, these candid and insightful essays tackle the complicated knot of women’s desire.

Featuring essays by Elisa Albert, Kristen Arnett, Molly McCully Brown, Angela Cardinale, Tara Conklin, Sonia Maria David, Jennifer De Leon, Camille T. Dungy, Melissa Febos, Amber Flame, Amy Gall, Aracelis Girmay, Sonora Jha, Nicole Hardy, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, TaraShea Nesbit, Keyanah B. Nurse, Torrey Peters, Amanda Petrusich, Larissa Pham, Rena Priest, Joanna Rakoff, Karen Russell, Domenica Ruta, Susan Shapiro, Terese Svoboda, Lisa Taddeo, Ann Tashi Slater, Abigail Thomas, Merritt Tierce, Michelle Wildgen, Jane Wong, and Teresa Wong]]> 352 Margot Kahn 1646220110 Karan 0 to-read 3.93 2023 Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
author: Margot Kahn
name: Karan
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture]]> 61144950 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Book Riot best book of 2023
A Science Friday best book of 2023
An Audible best well-being audiobook of 2023

By the time they reach kindergarten, most kids believe that “fat� is bad. By middle school, more than a quarter of them have gone on a diet. What are parents supposed to do?

Kids learn, as we’ve all learned, that thinness is a survival strategy in a world that equates body size and value. Parents worry if their kids care too much about being thin, but even more about the consequences if they aren’t. And multibillion-dollar industries thrive on this fear of fatness. We’ve fought the “war on obesity� for over forty years and Americans aren’t thinner or happier with their bodies. But it’s not our kids—or their weight—who need fixing.

In this illuminating narrative, journalist Virginia Sole-Smith exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face from school, sports, doctors, diet culture, and parents themselves—and offers strategies for how families can change the conversation around weight, health, and self-worth.

Fat Talk is a stirring, deeply researched, and groundbreaking book that will help parents learn to reckon with their own body biases, identify diet culture, and empower their kids to navigate this challenging landscape. Sole-Smith draws on her extensive reporting and interviews with dozens of parents and kids to offer a provocative new approach for thinking about food and bodies, and a way for us all to work toward a more weight-inclusive world.]]> 384 Virginia Sole-Smith 1250831210 Karan 0 to-read 4.27 2023 Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
author: Virginia Sole-Smith
name: Karan
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Blazing World and Other Writings]]> 354620
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 272 Margaret Cavendish 0140433724 Karan 0 to-read 3.26 The Blazing World and Other Writings
author: Margaret Cavendish
name: Karan
average rating: 3.26
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake]]> 207003966 A blazing new talent’s hilarious memoir about coming of age and coming out in Pakistan, moving to America, looking for love, and falling in love with himself along the way.

I’m just a man, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cake.

What do you do when you’re too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and you’re ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are?

Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or bullied for their “manboobs,� or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid.

Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post-9/11 world and society’s rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket.

Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, that there are people and places he’d need to let go of to move forward.]]> 272 Komail Aijazuddin 1419773844 Karan 0 to-read 4.33 2024 Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake
author: Komail Aijazuddin
name: Karan
average rating: 4.33
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]]> <![CDATA[These Bodies of Water: Notes on the British Empire, the Middle East and Where We All Meet]]> 57533364 Are you not made of Suez silt?
How do we know you won't
shore our boats
by making yourself bigger
than we made you?

Sabrina Mahfouz once sat in a Whitehall interview room and was interrogated about everything from her political leanings to her private life. It was ostensibly a job interview, but implicit in their demands was the unspoken question: as a woman of Middle Eastern heritage, could she really be trusted?

Years later, Sabrina found herself confronting the meaning behind this interrogation, and how it was specifically informed by the British Empire's historical dominance in the Middle East. These Bodies of Water investigates this history through the Middle Eastern coastlines and waterways that were so vital to the Empire's hold. Interwoven with her own personal experiences, Sabrina combines history, politics, myth and poetry in a devastating examination of this unacknowledged part of Britain's colonial past.

Part history, part polemic and part intimate memoir, These Bodies of Water is a tapestry of writing that tells the story of Britain's relationship with the Middle East in the most revealing terms.]]> 320 Sabrina Mahfouz 1472282485 Karan 0 to-read 4.13 2022 These Bodies of Water: Notes on the British Empire, the Middle East and Where We All Meet
author: Sabrina Mahfouz
name: Karan
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
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]]> <![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 Karan 0 to-read 4.43 1971 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
author: Walter Rodney
name: Karan
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1971
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]]> Hot Air 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Karan 0 to-read 3.38 2025 Hot Air
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Karan
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/30
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]]> The Original Daughter 215813968 In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.

When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is.

In the story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, rife with emotional clarity and searing social insight.]]> 354 Jemimah Wei 1399625608 Karan 0 to-read 4.48 2025 The Original Daughter
author: Jemimah Wei
name: Karan
average rating: 4.48
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Karan 5 relevant and relatable, oof. 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Karan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves:
review:
relevant and relatable, oof.
]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition]]> 40881621 The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography� or “diary� containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.]]> 433 Fernando Pessoa 0811226948 Karan 0 to-read 4.39 1982 The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: Karan
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Open City 8526694
But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.]]> 259 Teju Cole 1400068096 Karan 0 to-read 3.50 2011 Open City
author: Teju Cole
name: Karan
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Alone 122118108 An intoxicating story of collapse and survival


Mei is a forty-two year-old editor living in Barcelona. After years of unsuccessfully trying to become pregnant, and having grown apart from her husband, she decides to escape her crude reality when she’s made redundant from her job at a publishing house.


When she moves to the cottage where she grew up, hidden in a remote forest of Catalunya, she believes this to be the perfect opportunity to finish the novel she’s been obsessing over. But as she begins writing, or trying to, tragedy hits her and solitude possesses her, forcing her to face her past, an unsolicited present and a future that is adrift.


As Mei’s chance encounters and new relationships with figures from her childhood seem to keep her grounded, the forest and its inhabitants take over her as she fights to finish her novel and attempt to escape solitude unscathed.

]]> 272 Carlota Gurt 1787704440 Karan 0 to-read 3.56 Alone
author: Carlota Gurt
name: Karan
average rating: 3.56
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Only This Beautiful Moment 61941000 From the Stonewall Honor–winning author of Like a Love Story comes a sweeping story of three generations of boys in the same Iranian family. Perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay.

2019. Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. When Moud gets the news that his grandfather in Iran is dying, he accompanies his dad to Tehran, where the revelation of family secrets will force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself.

1978. Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country’s burgeoning revolution, they send him to safety in America, a country Saeed despises. And even worse—he’s forced to live with the American grandmother he never knew existed.

1939. Bobby, the son of a calculating Hollywood stage mother, lands a coveted MGM studio contract. But the fairy-tale world of glamour he’s thrust into has a dark side.

Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.]]> 400 Abdi Nazemian 0063039370 Karan 0 to-read 4.42 2023 Only This Beautiful Moment
author: Abdi Nazemian
name: Karan
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Alternatives 192761615
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when theirparents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningfulwork in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search ofa sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.]]> 352 Caoilinn Hughes 0593545001 Karan 0 to-read 3.41 2024 The Alternatives
author: Caoilinn Hughes
name: Karan
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Amma 202955293
This event becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithara, and her granddaughter Annie.

The effects cascade through generations as Annie sets out across the world to discover what happened to fracture her family.

Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Amma is a novel about how the past lives with us forever, and wherever we are.

Written in sensuous, vivid prose, Amma is a story of the rich history and unknown future of the Sri Lankan diaspora - and of one family desperately trying to find peace.]]> 280 Saraid de Silva 1739260147 Karan 0 to-read 4.28 2024 Amma
author: Saraid de Silva
name: Karan
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hagstone 198133381
On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home. It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and the feminine. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature.

All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural � a Summoning as the Inions call it. One day, a letter arrives at Nell’s door from the reclusive Inions who invite Nell into the commune for a commission to produce a magnificent art piece to celebrate their long history. In its creation, Nell will discover things about the community and about herself that will challenge everything she thought she knew.

Beautifully written, prescient and eerily haunting, Sinéad Gleeson’s fiction debut takes in the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world. A novel from one of our most beloved literary voices, this is perfect for fans of Margaret Atwood and Sarah Moss.]]> 307 Sinéad Gleeson 0008626669 Karan 0 to-read 3.55 2024 Hagstone
author: Sinéad Gleeson
name: Karan
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Felix Ever After 51931067 From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle....

But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.]]> 368 Kacen Callender 0062820257 Karan 5 queer-writing 4.21 2020 Felix Ever After
author: Kacen Callender
name: Karan
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: queer-writing
review:

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