en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:46:59 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 salma 0 3.84 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: salma
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 3356942 157 Georges Perec salma 0 to-read 3.66 1965
author: Georges Perec
name: salma
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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]]> 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 salma 0 3.77 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: salma
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 2616360
An unnamed narrator is sitting in a coffee shop in London. He is fascinated by the crowd outside the window and considers how isolated people think they are, despite "the very denseness of the company around." He takes time to categorize the different types of people he sees. As evening falls, he focuses on "a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age," whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and whose body "was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble." Although he is wearing filthy, ragged clothes, they are of a "beautiful texture." As the man moves on, the narrator dashes out of the shop to follow him. He leads the narrator through bazaars and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into "the heart of the mighty London." At which point the two meet.]]> 3 Edgar Allan Poe 1883049385 salma 0 3.41 1840
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: salma
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1840
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]]> 228394781 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.]]> 160 Vincent Delecroix 1913109372 salma 0 4.05
author: Vincent Delecroix
name: salma
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]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 salma 0 3.89 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: salma
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
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]]> 205544315 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters �� the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost �� that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.]]> 192 Banu Mushtaq 1916751164 salma 0 3.58
author: Banu Mushtaq
name: salma
average rating: 3.58
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]]> 88564033 122 Anne Serre 0811234517 salma 0 3.55
author: Anne Serre
name: salma
average rating: 3.55
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]]> 61991253
Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.

Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels -- a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

Acclaim for The Wonder :

"Deliciously gothic.... Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep" ( USA Today , 3/4 stars)

"Heartbreaking and transcendent"( New York Times )

"A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body.... Donoghue keeps us riveted" ( Chicago Tribune )

"Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief" ( Newsday )]]> 320 Emma Donoghue 031656446X salma 4 4.03 2016
author: Emma Donoghue
name: salma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 36473933 A showstopping luxury gift book to cherish for years to come.

The Moomins: The World of Moominvalley is the ultimate guide for any Moomin fan, old and new. Step into the magical world of Moominvalley with this beautiful one of a kind book; a fun, fascinating, behind the scenes look at the wonderful world of the Moomins and their creator, Tove Jansson.

Filled with illustrated maps and family trees, facts about Moomintroll behaviour and habits, this gorgeous book contains all you could wish to know about the beloved characters from the original Moomin stories and the world in which they live. Find out all about Moomintroll's adventures, Moominmamma's handbag and Moominpappa's diary and discover all the favourite Moomin characters, including Snork Maiden, Snufkin, Sniff and Little My. Get a glimpse behind the studio door of the uniquely talented Tove Jansson.

Featuring original Moomin drawings, colour studies and stunning sketches of her iconic characters, as well as family photographs and Tove's childhood drawings. With a luxuriously designed die-cut cover featuring gold foil, this breathtaking hardback is the perfect addition to the collection of any Moomin fan.

Written by the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Philip Ardagh, with contributions from bestselling children's author, screenwriter and Moomin devotee, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, The Moomins: The World of Moominvalley is a highly illustrated, beautifully designed gift book for all Moomin fans to treasure.]]> 324 Philip Ardagh 1509810013 salma 0 to-read 4.59 2017
author: Philip Ardagh
name: salma
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> 221978628 The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon. A propulsive, prophetic novel about the beauty of language and the nature of identity in the age of AI.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort �� Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous �� and much younger �� boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot��

Awarded Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.]]> 144 Rie Qudan 1405972068 salma 0 to-read 3.24 2024
author: Rie Qudan
name: salma
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> 203578775 Eliza Moss's intoxicating debut novel is a dark, intense, and compelling account of what happens when a young woman falls in love with the wrong kind of man.

Enola is approaching 30 and everything feels like a lot. The boxes aren’t ticked and she feels adrift in a way she thought she would have beaten by now. She wants to be a writer but can't finish a first draft; she romanticizes her childhood but won’t speak to her mother; she has never been in a serious relationship but yearns to be one half of a couple that DIYs together at the weekends.

Enter: enigmatic writer. Enola falls in love and starts to dream about their perfect future: the wedding, the publishing deals, the house in Stoke Newington. But the reality is far from perfect. He’s distant. But she’s a Cool Girl, she doesn’t need to hear from him every day. He hangs out with his ex. But she's a Cool Girl, she’s not insecure. Is she? He has dark moods. But he’s a creative, that’s part of his ‘process��. Her best friend begs her to end it, but Enola can’t. She's a Cool Girl.

She might feel like she’s going crazy at times, but she wants him. She needs him. She would die without him...That's what love is, ������’t it? Over the next twenty-four hours (and two years), everything that Enola thinks she knows is about to unravel, and she has to think again about how she sees love, family, and friendship and—most importantly—herself.

With notes of Fleabag & I May Destroy You but with the sparseness and emotional accuracy of writers like Ali Smith and Lily King, What It's Like In Words is a close examination of what it means to experience the intense emotional uncertainty of first love.]]> 320 Eliza Moss 1250355052 salma 0 to-read 3.64 2024
author: Eliza Moss
name: salma
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> 175678711
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 salma 0 to-read, kindle-library 3.93 2019
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: salma
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 60376806
Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap/ There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens.

These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers.

WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID MITCHELL AND AN INTRODUCTION BY KAORI NAGAI

'Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class' David Mitchell

'For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale, the specificity and surprise of tanka , collisions of the everyday with the supernatural and glimpses of Japan right on the brink of industrialization, Kenji Miyazawa's masterly stories will be a delight' New York Times

' Few works have given me so much pleasure (and hard work) as the tales of Miyazawa Kenji [...] more genuine originality, and a more universal appeal, than almost anything else I have done.' John Bester, translator]]> 230 Kenji Miyazawa 178487776X salma 0 to-read 3.54 1934
author: Kenji Miyazawa
name: salma
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1934
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]]> 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 salma 0 to-read 3.56 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: salma
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 219827860 The fragrance of a single stem in a vase.
The shimmering reflection of fireworks in a lake.
The quiet of a bookshop as evening falls.
The feeling of opening a brand-new diary and beginning to write ...

Moments of beauty endure. But what happens when you begin to forget?

Yuriko leads a quiet, orderly life as a piano teacher. It's New Year's Eve and her grown-up son Izumi comes to visit. Yuriko makes him his favourite omelette and hayashi rice. Together, they look like a normal family.

But Yuriko has a secret. Many years earlier, when Izumi was a boy, Yuriko suddenly disappeared for an entire year. She returned, but the lost year was never discussed.

Now as Yuriko begins to lose her memory, Izumi is forced to race against time as he seeks the truth behind this long-buried mystery. Will he learn to understand the woman his mother once was, before it is too late? And is he ready to become a father himself?

One Hundred Flowers is a story about the preciousness of every moment, the beauty and pain of family love, and the healing power of letting go.]]> 288 Genki Kawamura 1804189596 salma 0 to-read 3.81 2019
author: Genki Kawamura
name: salma
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 341272 176 H.G. Wells 014144102X salma 0 to-read 3.62 1896
author: H.G. Wells
name: salma
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1896
rating: 0
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]]> 44045
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.]]> 120 Jorge Luis Borges 0142437891 salma 0 to-read 4.03 1935
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: salma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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]]> 193388294
“A radical novel...I’m obsessed with this book.�� —Jessamine Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers

There is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.

Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and culminate in a painful confrontation �� mostly, between our narrator and herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering the world after post-partum depression.]]> 208 Szilvia Molnar 0593467787 salma 0 to-read 3.91 2023
author: Szilvia Molnar
name: salma
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58678702 67 Annie Ernaux 1644213575 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.98 1991
author: Annie Ernaux
name: salma
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 60843483 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.�� She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
��
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1644212196 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.47 2001
author: Annie Ernaux
name: salma
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 7603179 175 Tove Jansson 0312608888 salma 5 'It would be a terrible thing if a comet hit the earth.'
'What would happen then?' whispered Sniff.
'Everything would explode,' said Moomintroll, gloomily.
There was a long silence.
Then Snufkin said slowly: 'It would be awful if the earth exploded. It's so beautiful.'

-
this was one of the most wholesome things i've ever read i could cry :') i love the moomins so much i love the snork maiden i love snufkin i love tove jansson !!!!!!!]]> 4.21 1946
author: Tove Jansson
name: salma
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1946
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: own, own-read, translated, aty-25
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'It would be a terrible thing if a comet hit the earth.'
'What would happen then?' whispered Sniff.
'Everything would explode,' said Moomintroll, gloomily.
There was a long silence.
Then Snufkin said slowly: 'It would be awful if the earth exploded. It's so beautiful.'

-
this was one of the most wholesome things i've ever read i could cry :') i love the moomins so much i love the snork maiden i love snufkin i love tove jansson !!!!!!!
]]> 822730 The Wretched of the Earth is considered by many to be one of the canonical books on the worldwide black liberation struggles of the 1960s. Within a Marxist framework, using a cutting and nonsentimental writing style, Fanon draws upon his horrific experiences working in Algeria during its war of independence against France. He addresses the role of violence in decolonization and the challenges of political organization and the class collisions and questions of cultural hegemony in the creation and maintenance of a new country's national consciousness. As Fanon eloquently writes, "[T]he unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps."
Although socialism has seemingly collapsed in the years since Fanon's work was first published, there is much in his look into the political, racial, and social psyche of the ever-emerging Third World that still rings true at the cusp of a new century.--Eugene Holley, Jr.]]> 256 Frantz Fanon 0141186542 salma 0 to-read 4.28 1961
author: Frantz Fanon
name: salma
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25734172 All the beauty of modern physics in fewer than a hundred pages.

This is a book about the joy of discovery. A playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics, it's already a major bestseller in Italy and the United Kingdom. Carlo Rovelli offers surprising—and surprisingly easy to grasp—explanations of general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to��the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,�� Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”]]> 81 Carlo Rovelli 0399184414 salma 0 to-read, own, own-tbr 3.97 2014
author: Carlo Rovelli
name: salma
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written�� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I�� for the “we�� (or “they��, or “one��) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents�� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents�� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we�� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 salma 0 to-read 4.22 2008
author: Annie Ernaux
name: salma
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 7902560 An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.]]> 55 Georges Perec 0984115528 salma 3 3.78 1975
author: Georges Perec
name: salma
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: e-library, kindle-library, nonfiction, translated
review:

]]> 497499 262 Magda Szabó 1843431939 salma 0 to-read 4.09 1987
author: Magda Szabó
name: salma
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28933476 138 Georges Perec salma 0 to-read 4.12 1967
author: Georges Perec
name: salma
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217006044 In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

]]> 296 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0593852605 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.94 2025
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: salma
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
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]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

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

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

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.64 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: salma
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 211004176 Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.��

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters�� bond but also their lives will be at risk…]]> 133 Amal El-Mohtar 1250341086 salma 0 to-read, e-library 4.19 2025
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: salma
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 181886115 In The End of the World is a Cul de Sac the political is intertwined with the personal, as Louise Kennedy reveals how ordinary lives can get caught up in a wider, national drama.

Sarah, abandoned by her partner, sits alone in their brand new house.

Orla, facing the strange revenge of her husband, is forced to judge a contest in the local fête.

Peter raises his daughter in rural seclusion, at what might as well be the end of the world.

Louise Kennedy started writing at the age of forty-seven, and her prose is instilled with a clarity and wisdom born of her own experience. This collection announces a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Louise Kennedy 0593540921 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.56 2021
author: Louise Kennedy
name: salma
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.65 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: salma
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 63057148
Three low-income families have been given a handsome retainer to join Geraldine Borden for a day at her cliffside estate. All the parents must do to collect the rest of their money is allow their children to test out the revolutionary playground equipment Geraldine has been working on for decades. But there’s a reason the structures in the bowels of her gothic castle have taken so long to develop—they were never meant to see the light of day.

When a band of dysfunctional children is suddenly thrust into a diabolical realm of violence, they must grow up instantly to have a chance at survival. Will they find a way to put their differences aside, or be swallowed up by the insidious architecture all around them?

"With Playground, Aron Beauregard transcends himself, delivering a genuinely chilling, uncomfortable novel that will make even the most jaded horror fan squirm. A harrowing, relentless read that left me breathless."

- Brian Keene

This volume contains 15 interior illustrations.

WARNING: This book contains graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.]]> 290 Aron Beauregard salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.37 2022
author: Aron Beauregard
name: salma
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 211004179 For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things, and The Other Black Girl, Listen To Your Sister is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.

Twenty-five year old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting Calla: recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.]]> 352 Neena Viel 1250906326 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.26 2025
author: Neena Viel
name: salma
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 214269353 From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.��

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.]]> 311 Jinwoo Chong 0593727053 salma 0 to-read, e-library 4.02 2025
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: salma
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 salma 0 to-read, e-library 4.04 2025
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: salma
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 8915857 Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.]]> 100 Tove Jansson 1590173783 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.99 1989
author: Tove Jansson
name: salma
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

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

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

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

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 salma 0 to-read, e-library 4.34 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: salma
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
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]]> 198563641 From the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over and Flying Solo, a podcast producer agrees to host a new series about modern dating—but will the show jeopardize her chance at finding real love?

Cecily Foster loves to make podcasts. She fiercely protects her colleagues, dearly adores her friends, and never misses dinner with her sister. But after a disastrous relationship with a colleague who stole her heart and her ideas, she’s put romantic love on hold.

When the boss who’s disappointed her again and again finally offers her the chance to host her own show, she wants to be thrilled. But there’s a catch—actually, two catches. First, the show will be about Cecily’s dating life. And second, she has to follow the guidance of influencer and newly minted relationship coach Eliza Cassidy, whose relentlessly upbeat attitude seems ready-made for social media, not real life.

Cecily would rather do anything other than put her singledom on display (ugh) or take advice from the internet (UGH). But when her boss hints that doing the show is the only way to protect a friend’s job, she realizes she has no choice.

To make matters more complicated, once she’s committed to twenty blind dates of Eliza’s choosing, Cecily finds herself unable to stop thinking about Will, a photographer she helped to rescue a very big and very lovable lost dog. Even though there are sparks between the two, Will’s own path is uncertain, and Eliza’s skeptical comments about Cecily’s decision-making aren’t helping. On the one hand, Will seems great. But on the other hand . . . don’t they all?

As Cecily struggles to balance the life she truly desires and the one Eliza wants to create for her, she finds herself at a crossroads. Can Cecily sort through all the advice and find a way to do what she loves without losing herself in the process?]]> 320 Linda Holmes 059359925X salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.78 2025
author: Linda Holmes
name: salma
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 42982562 250 Ida Jessen 1939810175 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.97 2015
author: Ida Jessen
name: salma
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 351985
Nimbly hopscotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an aging matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 334 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.]]> 258 Thomas M. Disch 0375705449 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.64 1972
author: Thomas M. Disch
name: salma
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 7907605 New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.�� In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.”��

In this “journal�� Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen�� reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.]]> 106 Annie Ernaux 0803228155 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.83 2000
author: Annie Ernaux
name: salma
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 211934924 A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author’s twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life.

On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just the size of her palm, dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii, and so begins an ineffable bond.

Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, through a lifetime of choices and compromises made in pursuit of quiet, solitude, and a space to create. Through it all, her cat, a formidably independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse.

From the late Mayumi Inaba, the winner of the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is more than a love letter to feline companionship—it is a probing, stirring meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.]]> 192 Mayumi Inaba 0374614784 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.65 1999
author: Mayumi Inaba
name: salma
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, e-library
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]]> 59664718 Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books—the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.]]> 80 Annie Ernaux 1913097692 salma 3 3.88 1993
author: Annie Ernaux
name: salma
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: kindle-library, e-library, nonfiction, translated
review:

]]> 51087695
Peter Hunt cuts away the psychological speculation that has grown up around the Alice books, and instead traces the historical sources of their multilayered in-jokes and political, literary, and philosophical satire. He situates the books in the history of children’s literature and explores the local and personal references that the real Alice would have understood. Equally fascinating are the rich fragments about everything from the “sensation�� novel to Darwinian theory—not to mention Dodgson’s personal feelings—that he wove into the books as they developed.

Illustrated with manuscripts, portraits, Sir John Tenniel’s original line drawings for the first editions, and contemporary photographs, this is an innovative look at two remarkable stories. The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland takes us on a guided tour from the treacle wells of Victorian Oxford through an astonishing world of politics, philosophy, humor, and nightmare.]]> 128 Peter Hunt 1851245324 salma 0 to-read 4.09
author: Peter Hunt
name: salma
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55728076 Soar into the modern classic about a young witch and her clever cat--the inspiration for the Hiyao Miyazaki film that became a phenomenom!

Half-witch Kiki never runs from a challenge. So when her thirteenth birthday arrives, she's eager to follow a witch's tradition: choose a new town to call home for one year.

Brimming with confidence, Kiki flies to the seaside village of Koriko and expects that her powers will easily bring happiness to the townspeople. But gaining the trust of the locals is trickier than she expected. With her faithful, wise-cracking black cat, Jiji, by her side, Kiki forges new friendships and builds her inner strength, ultimately realizing that magic can be found in even the most ordinary places.

Blending fantasy with the charm of everyday life, this enchanting new translation will inspire both new readers and dedicated fans.

A gentle story of magic-tinged independence.--The Wall Street Journal

An enchanting, gently humorous all-ages family read-aloud.--Kirkus Reviews

Young readers will delight in Kiki's humorous experiences.--School Library Journal]]> 193 Eiko Kadono 1984896695 salma 4 4.17 1985
author: Eiko Kadono
name: salma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: own, ghibli-collection, own-read, translated, aty-25
review:

]]> 224070664
For fans of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Lisa Taddeo's Animal, Shy Girl is a harrowing tale of girlhood, survival, autonomy, and revenge.]]> 247 Mia Ballard salma 0 to-read 3.98 2025
author: Mia Ballard
name: salma
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17225311 "Smart and biting" —New York Journal of Books

"Laced with dark, sometimes savage humor and juicy riffs on consumer culture and its twin obsessions, youth and beauty" ��Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Celeste Price is twenty-six years old, beautiful, smart, married to a handsome man with money, and starting a new job as a junior high school teacher in suburban Tampa. Yet she harbors a dark secret. She is driven by a singular sexual obsession—fourteen-year-old boys. As the school year begins, Celeste has chosen and seduced the naive Jack Patrick, a quiet, thoughtful boy in awe of his teacher. But when her lustful frenzy begins to spiral out of control, the insatiable Celeste bypasses each hurdle with swift thinking and shameless determination.

"Impeccably written, full of smart cultural observations, and no small amount of wit . . . A very bold book." —Daily Beast]]> 266 Alissa Nutting 0062280562 salma 0 to-read 3.36 2013
author: Alissa Nutting
name: salma
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22136 295 Edward W. Said 1862073708 salma 0 to-read 4.03 1999
author: Edward W. Said
name: salma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 69719 163 Jamaica Kincaid 2253153818 salma 0 to-read 3.83 1990
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: salma
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212994452 'A modern-day Mrs. Caliban, BLOB is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend...

The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Now at twenty-three, after getting dumped and dropping out of college, Vi works as a front desk attendant at a hotel where she refills cucumber water samovars and fends off overtures of friendship from her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. But when Vi decides to accompany Rachel to a local drag show, her life changes forever. In the alley outside the bar, next to a trash can, is a blob with beady black eyes. Unable to leave it behind, Vi picks up the creature and, in a moment of drunken desperation, takes it home with her.

As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi realizes it obeys her commands and she decides to mold the blob into her ideal partner. She feeds it sugary cereal and a stream of pop culture, and soon the creature transforms into a movie-star handsome white man. But as Vi's desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex-boyfriend who has unfriended her, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships. Ultimately, Vi embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns that it's impossible to control those you love.

Blending the familiar with the fantastical, BLOB tells a witty, heartfelt story of what it means to be human.

'An inventive, utterly unique debut'
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light]]> 256 Maggie Su 0063358646 salma 0 to-read 3.39 2025
author: Maggie Su
name: salma
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36491506 ��
When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?
��
Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting��Winter��casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.]]> 336 Ali Smith 1101870761 salma 4 kindle-library, e-library 3.88 2017
author: Ali Smith
name: salma
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: kindle-library, e-library
review:

]]> 557658 1392 Robert Burton 0940322668 salma 0 to-read 4.17 1621
author: Robert Burton
name: salma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1621
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17986414 The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

In her new translation of Kafka’s masterpiece, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment.]]> 126 Franz Kafka 0393347095 salma 0 3.89 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: salma
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1915
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, own, own-tbr, e-library
review:

]]> 2173611
By opening that door, Charmain has become responsible for not only the house, but for an extremely magical stray dog, a muddled young apprentice wizard, and a box of the king's most treasured documents. She has encountered a terrifying beast called a lubbock, irritated a clan of small blue creatures, and wound up smack in the middle of an urgent search. The king and his daughter are desperate to find the lost, fabled Elfgift—so desperate that they've even called in an intimidating sorceress named Sophie to help. And where Sophie is, can the Wizard Howl and fire demon Calcifer be far behind?

Of course, with that magical family involved, there's bound to be chaos—and unexpected revelations. No one will be more surprised than Charmain by what Howl and Sophie discover.]]> 404 Diana Wynne Jones 0061477958 salma 0 4.05 2008
author: Diana Wynne Jones
name: salma
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, kindle-library, e-library, own, own-tbr
review:

]]> 7727499 176 Tove Jansson 0312608896 salma 0 to-read, own, own-tbr 4.31 1948
author: Tove Jansson
name: salma
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, own, own-tbr
review:

]]> 208896802
First published in 1974, it features 126 pages of classic Peanuts newspaper strips from 1958-1964.

This facsimile edition features 122 classic comic strips from the 1960s and features many classic characters, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Pig Pen, and many. Join them as they navigate their way through school, first crushes, the complexities of baseball, and the world of the forever unseen grown-ups and their crazy rules.]]> 128 Charles M. Schulz 1787742717 salma 0 to-read, own, own-tbr 4.43 1964
author: Charles M. Schulz
name: salma
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, own, own-tbr
review:

]]> 61287784
Whisked away to his crumbling manor, Liska soon discovers the sinister roots of their bargain. And if she wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts of his past.

Those who enter the wood do not always return…]]> 336 A.B. Poranek salma 0 to-read, e-library 4.04 2024
author: A.B. Poranek
name: salma
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, e-library
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]]> 218537050 Malm unearths the shared roots of colonial adventurism in Palestine and fossil fuelled warfare.

Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this urgent pamphlet, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue durée analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire’s first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain’s fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today.]]> 112 Andreas Malm 1836740093 salma 0 to-read 4.49
author: Andreas Malm
name: salma
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212436950
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a feast awaits its guests, a man cannot believe his great good luck, and ancient gods get ready to receive their due in this horror-fantasy updating of Greek myths.

An exclusive paperback for Indie Bookstore Day, featuring a new story from Chelsea G. Summers, the bestselling author of A Certain Hunger. Signed by the author.]]> 69 Chelsea G. Summers 196188416X salma 0 to-read 4.00 2024
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: salma
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> 213702691 Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.]]> 256 Mohammed El-Kurd salma 0 to-read 4.89 2025
author: Mohammed El-Kurd
name: salma
average rating: 4.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18283207 176 Hiromi Kawakami 1846275083 salma 0 3.63 2001
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: salma
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
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review:

]]> 9557 alternate cover can be found here

Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.

Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.

Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...]]> 229 Haruki Murakami 0099448475 salma 0 3.85 1999
author: Haruki Murakami
name: salma
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 4929 Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.]]> 467 Haruki Murakami 1400079276 salma 0 4.14 2002
author: Haruki Murakami
name: salma
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> 10374 Lord Jim.

Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.]]> 400 Haruki Murakami salma 0 4.14 1985
author: Haruki Murakami
name: salma
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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review:

]]> 41022133 A��New York Times��#1 Bestseller
A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the��Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,��Slate,��Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage's best books of the year

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage��is the long-awaited new novel—a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan—from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami.

Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.]]> 308 Haruki Murakami 0385352115 salma 0 3.93 2013
author: Haruki Murakami
name: salma
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read, e-library, kindle-library
review:

]]> 88077
The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.]]> 706 Thomas Mann salma 0 4.12 1924
author: Thomas Mann
name: salma
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1924
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 143534 O. Henry's classic tale of the wisest gifts of Christmas is itself a gift to share and treasure.

In a shabby New York flat, Della sobs as she counts the few coins she has saved to buy a Christmas present for her husband, Jim. One dollar and eighty-seven cents is all the money she has in the world. A gift worthy of her devotion will require a great sacrifice: selling her long, beautiful hair. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, this classic piece of American literature tells the story of a young couple and the value of love.

Jim, meanwhile, has made a sacrifice for Della that is no less difficult. As they exchange gifts on Christmas Eve, the discovery of what each has done fills them with despair, until they realize that the true gifts of Christmas can be found more readily in their humble apartment than in any fine store. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, this classic piece of American literature tells the story of a young couple and the value of love.

O. Henry paints a masterly portrait of unfaltering love, a haven from the harsh world outside. The poignancy of his story is captured in Zwerger's eloquent art, wherein every glance, every gesture, tells a subtle truth.]]> 26 O. Henry 141693586X salma 0 4.10 1905
author: O. Henry
name: salma
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1905
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 199295788 In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them.

Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Toyko, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationship between Takako, her uncle Satoru , and the people in their lives. A new cast of heartwarming regulars have appeared in the shop, including an old man who wears the same ragged mouse-colored sweater and another who collects books solely for the official stamps with the author’s personal seal.

Satoshi Yagisawa illuminates the everyday relationships between people that are forged and grown through a shared love of books. As time passes, Satoru, with Takako’s help, must choose whether to keep the bookshop open or shutter its doors forever. Making the decision will take uncle and niece on an emotional journey back to their family’s roots and remind them again what a bookstore can mean to an individual, a neighborhood, and a whole culture.]]> 176 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278715 salma 0 3.90 2011
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: salma
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 1209756 Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi appeared originally under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq. "Bugsy's" prose style is not quite the style of either of the collaborators, but in this volume, at least, "he never got out of hand," as Borges complained he did later.

In the first story, Parodi, who is himself in jail for homicide, is visited by a young man who seeks his help in solving a particularly baffling murder. In the second story, a killing takes place aboard an express train. One of the characters is a writer named Gervasio Montenegro, whom the discerning reader will identify as author of the book's expressive foreword. In "Tadeo Limardo's Victim," a murdered man prepares for his own death. "Tai An's Long Search" is a variation on Poe's "The Purloined Letter." In "Free Will and the Commendatore," a cuckold takes elaborate and invisible revenge.

The book also includes a short biography of H. Bustos Domecq by Adelma Badoglio, a provincial schoolteacher.

Comic in intent, and pointedly satirical, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi is an essential key to understanding Borges' development as a writer.]]> 160 Jorge Luis Borges 0525204806 salma 0 3.67 1942
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: salma
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
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review:

]]> 1772910 82 Fyodor Dostoevsky salma 0 4.16 1848
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: salma
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read, kindle-library, own, own-tbr, penguin-classics-collection
review:

]]> 61884932 There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This ������’t her story.

Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?

But nothing with fairies is ever simple.

Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He's heard there's a curse here that needs breaking, but it's a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…]]> 116 T. Kingfisher 1250244099 salma 0 to-read 3.95 2023
author: T. Kingfisher
name: salma
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53447237
Роман про нелегке життя жінки у консервативному патріархальному суспільстві, попри те, що Південна Корея аж ніяк не надається до визначення країни, відсталої в культурному й економічному розвитку. Відверта й розпачлива історія «другої статі», у якій сотні тисяч жінок по всьому світу впізнають себе.]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo 1631498673 salma 4
i don't think any woman can read this without seeing her thoughts, agitation, and self reflected within these words. this is not an empowering book. i was left with feelings of dread more than anything else after finishing it but despite that, it is necessary. ]]> 4.18 2016
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: salma
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: own, aty-25, own-read, translated
review:
this book perfectly encapsulates all the fears and grievances that come with womanhood and more importantly, motherhood. despite it being a novel, it felt more like a memoir following 3 generations of women whom struggles were passed down to like hand-me-downs. cho nam-joo citing real statistics from south korean society and listing the resources in the footnotes further solidified how this is far from a work of fiction.

i don't think any woman can read this without seeing her thoughts, agitation, and self reflected within these words. this is not an empowering book. i was left with feelings of dread more than anything else after finishing it but despite that, it is necessary.
]]> 203164415 From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0593701569 salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.94 2024
author: Ali Smith
name: salma
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 220409620
Initially reluctant, Rika starts to enjoy her strange new she and Venus talk about everything. They fall in love, and (with the help of a statue of Artemis�� hunting dog) eventually break free.

This fresh and original new novel from the author of Diary of a Void confirms Emi Yagi as one of the most exciting Japanese writers published in English today.]]> 224 Emi Yagi 1787304647 salma 0 to-read 3.30 2023
author: Emi Yagi
name: salma
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215583234
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.

Like a pacifist version of V in V for Vendetta, Gyuok recruits a trio of office allies to carry out plans for minor revenge. Together, these four “rebels�� commit tiny protests against those in more powerful positions through spraying graffiti, throwing eggs, and writing anonymous exposés. But as their attacks increase, the initial joy they felt at the release becomes something more and Jihye and the others will discover the beauty of friendship and the extraordinary power of unity against adversity.��]]> 240 Sohn Won-Pyung 0063378108 salma 0 to-read 3.60 2017
author: Sohn Won-Pyung
name: salma
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24874342
Swift's devastating short satire on how to solve a famine

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).

Swift's works available in Penguin Classics are Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal and Other Writings.]]> 56 Jonathan Swift 0141398183 salma 0 3.52 1729
author: Jonathan Swift
name: salma
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1729
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 4069 Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.]]> 165 Viktor E. Frankl 080701429X salma 0 4.38 1946
author: Viktor E. Frankl
name: salma
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 52207852 Are you longing to experience a more intimate and loving relationship with the Divine?

Secrets of Divine Love draws upon spiritual secrets of the Qur'an, ancient mystical poetry, and stories from the world's greatest prophets and spiritual masters to help you reignite your faith, overcome your doubts, and deepen your connection with God.

Through the use of scientific evidence, practical exercises, and guided meditations, you will develop the tools and awareness needed to discern and overcome your negative inner critic that prevents you from experiencing God's all-encompassing love.

The passages in this book serve as a compass and guiding light that returns you to the source of divine peace and surrender. Through the principles and practices of Islam, you will learn how to unlock your spiritual potential and unveil your divine purpose. Secrets of Divine Love uses a rational, yet heart-based approach towards the Qur'an that not only enlightens the mind, but inspires the soul towards deeper intimacy with God.]]> 387 A. Helwa 1734231203 salma 0 4.50
author: A. Helwa
name: salma
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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review:

]]> 62599296 The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.��

Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction's now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

��]]> 122 Adolfo Bioy Casares salma 5 3.77 1940
author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
name: salma
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: translated, e-library, kindle-library
review:

]]> 83346 228 Lewis Carroll 0688120490 salma 0 4.05 1871
author: Lewis Carroll
name: salma
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1871
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
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review:

]]> 318430
Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.

Public Domain (P)2013 Audible Ltd]]> 208 Thomas Robert Malthus 0192837478 salma 0 3.41 1798
author: Thomas Robert Malthus
name: salma
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1798
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read, e-library, kindle-library
review:

]]> 53328581 15 Haruki Murakami salma 0 to-read, e-library 3.45 2013
author: Haruki Murakami
name: salma
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read, e-library
review:

]]> 44285249
Kate Bolick finds parallels in oldest sister Meg’s brush with glamour at the Moffats�� ball and her own complicated relationship with clothes. Jenny Zhang confesses to liking Jo least among the sisters when she first read the novel as a girl, uncomfortable in finding so much of herself in a character she feared was too unfeminine. Carmen Maria Machado writes about the real-life tragedy of Lizzie Alcott, the inspiration for third sister Beth, and the horror story that can result from not being the author of your own life’s narrative. And Jane Smiley rehabilitates the reputation of youngest sister Amy, whom she sees as a modern feminist role model. These four voices form a deep, funny, far-ranging meditation on the power of great literature to shape our lives.]]> 192 Kate Bolick 1598536281 salma 0 to-read, own, own-tbr 3.68 2019
author: Kate Bolick
name: salma
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read, own, own-tbr
review:

]]> 220592349 WHAT IS YOUR ONE TRUE WISH?

Satomi is torn between her career in Tokyo and her relationship with her country-loving boyfriend, who plans to propose on Christmas Day. Meanwhile, Koyuki, Satomi's lowly intern, has been playing the role of the good girl, pretending to love her stepfather ever since her real father passed away last Christmas.

Satomi's sister-in-law, Junko, who lives in a small town with her husband and their toddler, Ayu, has a strained relationship with her abusive father who she hasn't seen since university. Her brother also left home after a particularly big fight. When their father becomes ill, both siblings return home - and discover something they never knew about him.

What are they truly wishing for? In Best Wishes from The Full Moon Coffee Shop the characters confront their past and present struggles while trying to find happiness and contentment in their lives.]]> 320 Mai Mochizuki 1914240995 salma 0 to-read 4.50 2021
author: Mai Mochizuki
name: salma
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22609310
For once, Auburn takes a chance and puts her heart in control, only to discover that Owen is hiding a huge secret. The magnitude of his past threatens to destroy everything Auburn loves most, and the only way to get her life back on track is to cut Owen out of it—but can she do it?]]> 306 Colleen Hoover 1476791457 salma 0 to-read 4.14 2015
author: Colleen Hoover
name: salma
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209801190
This book compiles many of the key insights discussed in the 4 previous seasons of Qur’an 30 for 30 and presents them in an organized and easy to read way.

Explore how some of the most important recurring themes of the Qur’an �� the Seerah of the Prophet ��, Judgement Day, and the Qur’anic worldview �� come together in each juz to provide us guidance for every aspect of life.]]> 246 Abu Muawiyah Ismail Kamdar salma 0 currently-reading 4.83
author: Abu Muawiyah Ismail Kamdar
name: salma
average rating: 4.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 29397486
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election.

They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.

Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.]]> 288 Robert Harris salma 0 to-read 4.02 2016
author: Robert Harris
name: salma
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17934653

I say I love and I love and I love . However, the window
will not close. However, the hawk searches
for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded
nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.
―from "Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together"

How to Dance as the Roof Caves In examines America as it faces a recession of collective mood and collective wealth. In a central sequence, the "housing bubble" reaches its bursting point when, with hilarious and biting outcomes, real estate developers hire a married couple and other down-and-out "extras" to stage a fake community to lure prospective investors. In these marvelous poems, Nick Lantz describes the changing American landscape with great imagination and sharp wit.]]> 96 Nick Lantz 1555976700 salma 0 own, aty-25, own-read, poetry 4.27 2014
author: Nick Lantz
name: salma
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: own, aty-25, own-read, poetry
review:

]]> 34875448 A love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat.

In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably—he is terrified of snakes—he lets roam his apartment. Then, during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love—which he will find in the most unexpected place.]]> 272 Pajtim Statovci 1101871830 salma 0 to-read 3.76 2014
author: Pajtim Statovci
name: salma
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24874335
Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes - one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

Marx's works available in Penguin Classics are Capital, Dispatches for the New York Tribune, Early Writings, Grundrisse, The Portable Karl Marx and Revolution and War.]]> 52 Karl Marx 0141397985 salma 0 3.44 1848
author: Karl Marx
name: salma
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read, own, own-tbr, penguin-classics-collection
review:

]]> 10697427
"Unlike any children's book I've ever read. [It] holds up to multiple rereadings, like the classic I think it will turn out to be." - New York Times Book Review]]> 288 Adam Gidwitz 0142419672 salma 0 to-read 3.97 2010
author: Adam Gidwitz
name: salma
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 salma 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: salma
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13570789 Listy do mlodego poety 84 Rainer Maria Rilke 0141192321 salma 4 4.23 1929
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: salma
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: own, penguin-classics-collection, aty-25, nonfiction, own-read, translated
review:

]]> 54017867
From his early days at the St Albans School and Oxford, Stephen Hawking’s brilliance and good humor were obvious to everyone he met. A lively and popular young man, it’s no surprise that he would later rise to celebrity status.

At twenty-one he was diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Though the disease weakened his muscles and limited his ability to move and speak, it did nothing to limit his mind. He went on to do groundbreaking work in cosmology and theoretical physics for decades after being told he had only a few years to live. He brought his intimate understanding of the universe to the public in his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time . Soon after, he added pop-culture icon to his accomplishments by playing himself on shows like Star Trek , The Simpsons , and The Big Bang Theory , and becoming an outspoken advocate for disability rights.

In Hawking , writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick have crafted an intricate portrait of the great thinker, the public figure, and the man behind both identities.]]> 304 Jim Ottaviani 1250777941 salma 2 3.82 2019
author: Jim Ottaviani
name: salma
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: own, graphic-novels, nonfiction, own-read
review:

]]> 53111 Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”]]> 204 Rainer Maria Rilke 0393328848 salma 0 to-read 4.45 1922
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: salma
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 153853 Peter Pan is edited with an introduction by Jack Zipes in Penguin Classics.

When Peter Pan and his fairy companion Tinker Bell fly in through the window of Wendy's nursery one night, it is the beginning of an adventure that whisks Wendy and her brothers Michael and John off to Neverland. There they will find mermaids, fairies, pirates led by the sinister Captain Hook, and the crocodile who bit off his leg - and still pursues him in hope of the rest! Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie's sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His adventures capture the spirit of childhood - and of rebellion against the role of adulthood in conventional society.

This edition includes the novel and the stories, and reproduces the original illustrations by Francis Donkin Bedford and Arthur Rackham. In his introduction, Jack Zipes sifts through the psychological interpretations that have engaged critics, explores the cultural and literary contexts in which we can appreciate Barrie's enduring creation, and shows why Peter Pan is fundamentally a work that urges adults to reconnect with their own imagination.]]> 234 J.M. Barrie 014243793X salma 0 to-read 3.85 2005
author: J.M. Barrie
name: salma
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 salma 0 to-read 4.51 2025
author: John Green
name: salma
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29358559 Upstream finds beloved poet Mary Oliver reflecting on her astonishment and admiration for the natural world and the craft of writing. ��

As she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, finding solace and safety within the woods, and the joyful and rhythmic beating of wings, Oliver intimately shares with her readers her quiet discoveries, boundless curiosity, and exuberance for the grandeur of our world.��

This radiant collection of her work, with some pieces published here for the first time, reaffirms Oliver as a passionate and prolific observer whose thoughtful meditations on spiders, writing a poem, blue fin tuna, and Ralph Waldo Emerson inspire us all to discover wonder and awe in life's smallest corners.]]> 178 Mary Oliver 1594206708 salma 0 to-read 4.17 2016
author: Mary Oliver
name: salma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

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