en-US Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:09:42 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 215749903 A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.

In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.

Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.]]> 352 Padraic X. Scanlan 1541601548 S. 0 to-read 4.21 2025
author: Padraic X. Scanlan
name: S.
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> 219551344 Who works for the government and what do they do? A timely and absorbing civics lessons from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýMichael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýWhether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these workers are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. The vivid profiles in On Duty blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.]]> 272 Michael Lewis S. 0 to-read 4.21 2025
author: Michael Lewis
name: S.
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> 213395442 A young woman’s seasonal job takes a dark, surreal turn in this vivid and surprising debut.

When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months� rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers� campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself.

As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.]]> 296 Margie Sarsfield 1324078731 S. 0 to-read 3.58 2025
author: Margie Sarsfield
name: S.
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 61991807 A story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martialĚýthat reveals a shocking truth.

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship The Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain.ĚýWhile chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, The Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell.ĚýThe thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes â€� they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.]]> 329 David Grann 1471183688 S. 0 to-read 4.23 2023
author: David Grann
name: S.
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 60229574
The Plague-Bearer

Harry Keogh is moving on. Though the search for his missing wife and child continues, his heart now lies in Edinburgh with Bonnie Jean—a beautiful Scottish werewolf whose friendly pack and flourishing pub have given him a place he can almost call home.

But from the rocky heights of Sicily, the diabolical Francezci brothers plot the wolf-pack's destruction; and down in the terrible Pit beneath Le Manse Madonie, an ancient evil schemes.

The vampires conspire. They reach a decision. They choose a vector. Mafia thug Mike Milazzo is no good to anyone, anytime, anywhere…which makes him perfect. Disposable.

The brothers infect him with a deadly poison—an engineered plague that even a werewolf could never survive—and they offer him a terrible successfully contaminate the wolf-pack, and receive the antidote. Fail, and die!

Mike has everything to lose. So does Harry Keogh. But the Necroscope lost everything once before, and he isn't about to do it again...

The Möbius Murders

Harry Keough, aka the Necroscope, has always considered himself a master of the Möbius Continuum—a dimension existing parallel to all space and time and his personal instantaneous gateway to anywhere in the multiverse. But this is hardly overweening conceit on Harry's part, for to his knowledge he is not unique; two other intelligences, with powers similar to his, do indeed exist. One such is the long-dead August Ferdinand Möbius himself, the German astronomer, mathematician, and discoverer of the eponymous Möbius Strip which led him to explore, posthumously, his previously conjectural Continuum; and the other is Harry s son, who has not only inherited his father's mathematical skill but also the metaphysical talent by means of which the Necroscope converses with dead people in their graves!

Picture Harry's confusion, then, on returning home via the Möbius Continuum from an adventure in Las Vegas, as he witnesses however briefly a flailing figure hurtling conscious but uncontrolled through the endless midnight of the Continuum. Who could this be—how can it be?—that a helpless, silently protesting other is rushing meteor-like across the Continuum's Stygian vault? Moreover, if he hasn't arrived here voluntarily, then what vile murderer has sent his victim on this monstrous journey to the end of life itself? For Harry is sure that this is neither his son s nor Professor Möbius' doing.

Who and where is he, this Möbius murderer? It is a mystery that only the Necroscope can ever hope to solve—but at what risk to his own life?

Who and where is he, this Mobius murderer? It is a mystery that only the Necroscope can ever hope to solve—but at what risk to his own life?]]> 327 Brian Lumley S. 0 to-read 4.33
author: Brian Lumley
name: S.
average rating: 4.33
book published:
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 52301693
From her beginnings as the daughter of a high-class courtesan to her extraordinary transformation into the most celebrated actress of her era, Sarah Bernhardt is brought to life by an internationally bestselling author praised for his historical novels featuring famous women.

Her highly dramatic professional life begins when Sarah's mother pulls her out of convent school to set Sarah up in her own trade as a sexual companion to a rich elderly gentleman. Despite her desire to pursue a career in stage acting, her mother cuts her off and Sarah has no choice but to comply. Pregnant and unmarried at sixteen, she is expected to give up her baby to the nuns, but she refuses to let him go.

A natural talent and darkly beautiful, Sarah gets a few theatrical roles, thanks to her bold, innovative acting style that attracts both admiration and scorn. Audiences want to see this controversial young actress, and amazingly, she is hired by the famed Comédie Française--only to have her life torn asunder in the savagery of the 1870 Siege of Paris. Amidst the ruins of the city, Sarah nurses wounded soldiers while falling passionately in love with her leading man.

Rising to the height of her fame as the toast of Paris, shocking audiences with her uninhibited acting style and portrayal of male characters, Sarah becomes world famous, touring America and Europe to sold-out crowds. Told in her own voice, this is Sarah Bernhardt's incandescent story--a fascinating, intimate account of a woman whose wholly original talent and indomitable spirit has enshrined her in history as the Divine Sarah.]]> 420 C.W. Gortner 1524799076 S. 0 to-read 3.93 2020
author: C.W. Gortner
name: S.
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 194036469
For Penny, an enthusiastic new hire, working at the store is the opportunity of a lifetime. As she uncovers the workings of this whimsical world, she bonds with a cast of unforgettable characters, including DallerGut, the flamboyant and wise owner, Babynap Rockabye, a famous dream designer, Maxim, a nightmare producer, and the many customers who dream to heal, dream to grow, and dream to flourish.

A captivating story that will leave a lingering magical feeling in readers' minds, this is the first book in a bestselling duology for anyone exhausted from the reality of their daily life.]]> 243 Lee Mi-ye 1035412748 S. 4 3.66 2020
author: Lee Mi-ye
name: S.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> 210191773 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

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

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 560 R.F. Kuang 0063021471 S. 0 to-read 4.28 2025
author: R.F. Kuang
name: S.
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> 62052321 A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society's most powerful, medically-enhanced elites.

"Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway." —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency.

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he's called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he's surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn't look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan—one of this dystopian, near-future society's genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal's thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca's discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves—with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news . . . aĚýmurderedĚýTitan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal's specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not justĚýany—she is Stefan's daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he's on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.]]> 236 Nick Harkaway 0593535367 S. 0 to-read 3.90 2023
author: Nick Harkaway
name: S.
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 224970641
In this gritty, haunting tale about doing whatever it takes for love, a small-town storyteller resolves to keep the local monster—and her own secrets—safe from a legendary knight.

Nestled deep in the steep hills, valleys, and surrounding woodlands lies Iron Hollow, a rural community beset by demons. Such horrors are common in the outlands, where most folks die young, if they don’t turn into monsters first. But what’s causing these transformations?

No one has the answer, not even the town’s oral historian, seventeen-year-old Shrike. And when a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest beast to haunt their woods, Shrike has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still human, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.

Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.]]> 36 Alix E. Harrow 1662527233 S. 0 to-read 4.07 2025
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: S.
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> 4948
One sunny Sunday, the caterpillar was hatched out of a tiny egg. He was very hungry. On Monday, he ate through one apple; on Tuesday, he ate through three plums--and still he was hungry. When full at last, he made a cocoon around himself and went to sleep, to wake up a few weeks later wonderfully transformed into a butterfly!

The brilliantly innovative Eric Carle has dramatized the story of one of Nature's commonest yet loveliest marvels, the metamorphosis of the butterfly. This audiobook will delight as well as instruct the very youngest listener.]]> 26 Eric Carle 0241003008 S. 5 4.33 1969
author: Eric Carle
name: S.
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 197510 12 Mo Willems 0786836504 S. 5 4.14 2005
author: Mo Willems
name: S.
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
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]]> 207567622 38 Brendan Wenzel 1797219987 S. 5 4.32
author: Brendan Wenzel
name: S.
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 199425552
Say hello to early learning concepts and the wild world of animals!
Ěý
Little ones will learn their colors with the help of a zebra, a swordfish, a sloth, and . . . an axolotl? More than sixty wonderful and endangered creatures from earth, sea, and sky parade across the pages and show the beauty and variety of our planet. A key at the back of the book identifies the animals for even more nature fun.

COLOR A rainbow of animal friends, from familiar everyday animals like house cats to rare and endangered animals like seahorses, make their hellos and introduce young children to colors at the same time.

WONDERFUL INTRODUCTION TO Kids will enjoy discovering the dazzling variety of animals in nature, from baboons to swordfish, poison dart frogs to red pandas. An answer key at the back identifies the names of each animal in the book.

FUN TO READ Simple rhythmic text and funny, appealing pictures make a joyous read-aloud experience for parents and children.

NATURE BOOKS FOR This new series celebrates the richness of animal life with a gentle underlying message of the importance of saving endangered species and caring for the environment.

BELOVED AND BESTSELLING Brendan Wenzel is a bestselling Caldecott Honor–winning artist and a sought-after speaker at schools and libraries. His booksĚý They All Saw a Cat , Hello Hello , andĚý A Stone Sat Still Ěýhave received multiple starred reviews and state awards and are family and classroom favorites.

Perfect ]]> 0 Brendan Wenzel 1797230573 S. 5 4.20
author: Brendan Wenzel
name: S.
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 36204763 They All Saw a Cat explores another aspect of seeing the world for young children. Beginning with two cats, one black and one white, a chain of animals appears before the reader, linked together by at least one common trait. From simple colors and shapes to more complex and abstract associations, each unexpected encounter celebrates the magnificent diversity of our world—and ultimately paints a story of connection. Brendan Wenzel's joyous, rhythmic text and exuberant art encourage readers to delight in nature's infinite differences and to look for—and marvel at—its gorgeous similarities. It all starts with a simple "Hello."]]> 40 Brendan Wenzel 1452150141 S. 5 4.22 2018
author: Brendan Wenzel
name: S.
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 199432890 Caldecott Honor–winning illustrator Brendan Wenzel’s irresistible animal images take the spotlight in this new series of concept board books for young children, based on his award-winning picture book Hello Hello.

Say hello to early learning concepts and the wild world of animals!

Little ones will learn their shapes with the help of a couple of polar bears, some tree frogs, and a whole host of parrots! More than forty wonderful and endangered creatures from earth, sea, and sky parade across the pages and show the beauty and variety of our planet. A key at the back of the book identifies the animals for even more nature fun.

LEARNING An appealing collection of wild animals—such asĚýgiraffes, polar bears, and wild cats—introduce young children to the world of shapes.

WONDERFUL INTRODUCTION TO Kids will enjoy discovering the dazzling variety of animals in nature, from tree frogs to polar bears, parrots to chameleons. An answer key at the back identifies the names of each animal in the book.

FUN TO READ Simple rhythmic text and funny, appealing pictures make a joyous read-aloud experience for parents and children.

NATURE BOOKS FOR This new series celebrates the richness of animal life with a gentle underlying message of the importance of saving endangered species and caring for the environment.

BELOVED AND BESTSELLING Brendan Wenzel is a bestselling Caldecott Honor–winning artist and a sought-after speaker at schools and libraries. His booksĚýThey All Saw a Cat, Hello Hello, andĚýA Stone Sat StillĚýhave received multiple starred reviews and state awards and are family and classroom favorites.

Perfect of Brendan WenzelParents, grandparents, caregivers, and educatorsPreschool and kindergarten level readersAnyone looking for early concept board books with compelling visuals or a fun, interactive family read-aloud bookGift-giving for baby showers and toddler birthdaysAnimal lovers and fans of shape books like Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site Bulldozer's Shapes; The Shapes Trilogy (Square, Circle, and Triangle); The Day the Crayons Quit; and The Very Hungry Caterpillar]]> 0 Brendan Wenzel 1797230603 S. 5 3.97
author: Brendan Wenzel
name: S.
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/10
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Reviewed for work (yes, even children's board books need to be quickly reviewed).
]]> 61393382
From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.]]> 5 T. Kingfisher 1250856892 S. 4 to-read 3.58 2022
author: T. Kingfisher
name: S.
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 218460368 From the New York Times bestselling author of Kaikeyi comes an epic and daring novel that imagines an alternate version of India that was never liberated from the British, and a young woman who will change the tides of history.

Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting each other than facing their true oppressors.

When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki and her group of friends begin to play a dangerous game, obtaining jobs working for the British while secretly planning to destroy the empire from the inside out. They found Kingston's new independence movement, knowing one wrong move means certain death. Facing threats from all quarters, Kalki must decide whether it’s more important to be a hero or to survive.

Told as ten moments from Kalki’s life that mirror the Dashavatara, the ten avatars of Vishnu, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is a sweeping, deeply felt speculative novel of empowerment, friendship, self-determination, and the true meaning of freedom.]]> 320 Vaishnavi Patel 0593874765 S. 0 to-read 4.26 2025
author: Vaishnavi Patel
name: S.
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 181865600
A mother and a son. A goddess and a prince. A curse and an oath. A river whose course will change the fate of the world.

Ganga, joyful goddess of the river, serves as caretaker to the mischievous godlings who roam her banks. But when their antics incur the wrath of a powerful sage, Ganga is cursed to become mortal, bound to her human form until she fulfills the obligations of the curse.

Though she knows nothing of mortal life, Ganga weds King Shantanu and becomes a queen, determined to regain her freedom no matter the cost. But in a cruel turn of fate, just as she is freed of her binding, she is forced to leave her infant son behind.

Her son, prince Devavrata, unwittingly carries the legacy of Ganga’s curse. And when he makes an oath that he will never claim his father’s throne, he sets in motion a chain of events that will end in a terrible and tragic war.

As the years unfold, Ganga and Devavrata are drawn together again and again, each confluence another step on a path that has been written in the stars, in this deeply moving and masterful tale of duty, destiny, and the unwavering bond between mother and son.]]> 496 Vaishnavi Patel 035652020X S. 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Vaishnavi Patel
name: S.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 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 S. 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: S.
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 215060542 With Camelot’s peace ebbing ever closer to shattering, the clock is ticking. But working with Merlin’s magic to retrieve her long-lost memories and save the kingdom brings more questions than answers: why is it that King Arthur, who treats his subjects with loving benevolence, can’t even stand to look at her? And why does that make Vera’s soul feel like it’s splitting in two? What robbed her of her memories in the first place...
And most importantly...
Why?
As Vera is about to discover; in a world of legend and power, the secrets of her memories are only the beginning.]]> 536 Paula Lafferty S. 0 to-read 4.47
author: Paula Lafferty
name: S.
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> 61884840 For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Burning, a queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling theater troupe

Shagun knows he will never be the kind of son his father demands. After the sudden deaths of his beloved twin sisters, Shagun flees his own guilt, his mother’s grief, and his father’s violent disapproval by enrolling at an all-boys boarding school. But he doesn’t find true belonging until he encounters a traveling theater troupe performing the Hindu myths of his childhood.

Welcomed by the other storytellers, Shagun thrives, easily embodying mortals and gods, men and women, and living on the road, where his father can’t catch him. When Shagun meets Marc, a charming photographer, he seems to have found the love he always longed for, too. But not even Marc can save him from his lingering shame, nor his father’s ever-present threat to send him to a conversion center. As Shagun’s past begins to engulf him once again, he must decide if he is strong enough to face what he fears most, and to boldly claim his own happiness.

Utterly immersive and spellbinding, The Sea Elephants is both dark and beautiful, harrowing and triumphant. An ode to the redemptive joys of art, Shastri Akella’s debut novel is a celebration of hard-won love—of others and for ourselves.]]> 384 Shastri Akella 1250867053 S. 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: Shastri Akella
name: S.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 217362723 A young woman wins the role of a lifetime in a film about a legendary heroine � but the real drama is behind the scenes in this sumptuous historical epic from the author of Mexican Gothic.

1950s Hollywood: Every actress wants to play Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary woman whose story has inspired artists since ancient times.

So when the film’s mercurial director casts Vera Larios, an unknown Mexican ingenue, in the lead role, she quickly becomes the talk of the town. Vera also becomes an object of envy for Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves.

Two actresses, both determined to make it to the top in Golden Age Hollywood—a city overflowing with gossip, scandal, and intrigue—make for a sizzling combination.

But this is the tale of three women, for it is also the story of the princess Salome herself, consumed with desire for the fiery prophet who foretells the doom of her stepfather, Herod: a woman torn between the decree of duty and the yearning of her heart.

Before the curtain comes down, there will be tears and tragedy aplenty in this sexy Technicolor saga.]]> 321 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593600266 S. 0 to-read 3.70 2024
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: S.
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 195790759 Winner of the Southern Book Prize for Fiction

A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars—from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term “redneck� would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Brimming with the high stakes drama of America’s buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, “Doc Moo" Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners' revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank's grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson.

Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as "The Most Dangerous Woman in America," struggles to maintain the ear of the miners ("her boys") amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief "Smilin" Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the "gun thugs" of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today's unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.]]> 310 Taylor Brown 1250329337 S. 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Taylor Brown
name: S.
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
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]]> 59947698
Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a shared secret.

Early 1900s: Taken from his homeland, twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of the time locked away in the attic of a large house by the sea. The only time Celestine isn’t bound by confines of the small space is when he is acting as an unpaid servant to English explorer Sir Richard Babbington, As the years pass, he desperately clings on to memories of his family in Africa, even as he struggles to remember his mother’s face, and sometimes his real name . . .

1974: Lowra, a young orphan girl born into wealth and privilege whose fortunes have now changed, finds herself trapped in the same attic. Searching for a ray of light in the darkness of the attic, Lowra finds under the floorboards an old-fashioned pen, a porcelain doll, a beaded necklace, and a message carved on the wall, written in an unidentifiable language. Providing comfort for her when all hope is lost, these clues will lead her to uncover the secrets of the attic.Ěý]]> 480 Lola Jaye 0063260379 S. 0 to-read 4.35 2022
author: Lola Jaye
name: S.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, MieczysĹ‚aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 S. 0 to-read 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: S.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 197897096 1 Claire Oshetsky S. 4 3.77 2024
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: S.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 222796693 Why the crisis of Christianity has become a crisis for democracy
Ěý
What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch—a lifelong atheist—reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.
Ěý
Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.
Ěý
In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.]]> 160 Jonathan Rauch 0300281544 S. 0 to-read 4.27
author: Jonathan Rauch
name: S.
average rating: 4.27
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]]> 220687903 “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.� ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School

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

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

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.]]> 336 Michael Clune 0593834429 S. 0 to-read 4.67
author: Michael Clune
name: S.
average rating: 4.67
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]]> 220458657 Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches�: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.]]> 368 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593874323 S. 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: S.
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> 201750794
They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Tables, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords are laying siege to Camelot, and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.]]> 673 Lev Grossman 0735224048 S. 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Lev Grossman
name: S.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 1067905 289 Tony Kushner 1854599828 S. 0 to-read 4.35 1995
author: Tony Kushner
name: S.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> 63005981 A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,� a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,� and in “Candy Pink,� a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.]]> 5 Agustina Bazterrica 1797158759 S. 3 to-read 3.06 2020
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: S.
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 36696533 “New Dark AgeĚýis among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life.”ĚýĚý–ĚýNew YorkerAs the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age. From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.]]> 357 James Bridle 178663550X S. 0 to-read 4.05 2018
author: James Bridle
name: S.
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 58950736 From a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, “an essential book for our times� (Ezra Klein), tracking the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies� founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.]]> 400 Max Fisher 031670332X S. 0 to-read 4.27 2022
author: Max Fisher
name: S.
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2022
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]]> 57933306 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]> 357 Johann Hari 0593138511 S. 0 to-read 4.22 2022
author: Johann Hari
name: S.
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
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]]> 8201080
As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.

Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.

Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.]]> 384 Tim Wu 0307269930 S. 0 to-read 3.85 2010
author: Tim Wu
name: S.
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> 150247424
Our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this—ever get the sense that an ad is “following� you around the internet?—but we don’t understand the extent to which the technology embedded in our phones, computers, cars, and homes is part of a vast ecosystem of data collection. Our public spaces are blanketed by cameras put up in the name of security. And pretty much everything that emits a wireless signal of any kind—routers, televisions, Bluetooth devices, chip-enabled credit cards, even the tires of every car manufactured since the mid-2000s—can be and often is covertly monitored. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of data about every citizen—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.

Reporter Byron Tau has been digging deep inside the growing alliance between business, tech, and government for years, piecing together a secret how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world have become a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring. Tau traces the unlikely tale of how the government came to view commercial data as a principal asset of national security in the years after 9/11, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, to build a foreign and domestic surveillance capacity of such breathtaking scope that it could peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. The result is a cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats with one directive—“get everything you can”—and, as Tau observes, a darkly humorous world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries, and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries.

Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is our era’s defining story of the dangerous grand bargain we’ve ubiquitous, often cheap technology, but at what price to our privacy?]]> 400 Byron Tau 0593443225 S. 0 to-read 4.29 2024
author: Byron Tau
name: S.
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 134119018 A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.� Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.]]> 290 Kyle Chayka S. 5
Filterworld, where every individual is nothing more than a faceless receiver of algorithmic results, and often creates 'content' (because we can't simply make art, we must create 'content' as capitalistic producers) to remain 'important'...at least, until the algorithm chooses something else for other people to pay attention to, possibly for no more than a few brief seconds.

Filterworld, where sources of self validation are found in seeing others as faceless tools of 'engagement.' Filterworld, where we must question whether we truly like a piece of (insert your word of choice here) media, or if we simply are pushed -to- like it because it, and algorithm-decided factors, tell us to do so.

'If you like this, then you'll like that" is often used on social media when promoting various forms of media, and yet all this does is further feed into the algorithms behind Filterworld. These sorts of suggestions, a parroting of how algorithms work in Filterworld, ignore individual taste and preferences.

The author recalls how, when they took a multi-year break from social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, they realized how much they'd previously been posting pictures and comments geared specifically towards an algorithm--suggesting that perhaps they were simply becoming part of it as well, simply by participating in it. Admittedly, I noticed much the same about myself after stopping my personal addiction to Instagram in particular. Less time spent taking pictures not because I necessarily -wanted- to take them, but because I was already trying to imagine how I would crop them -for- the algorithm, how I could create 'engagement' by using the right tags in the right order, by posting at the right time of day and on the right day of the week.

Filterworld is incredibly difficult to escape in this day and age, but we need to do so if at all possible, even in small ways. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a dissection of the homogenization and I'd go so far as to say destruction of connection and culture due to algorithms, particularly those used on social media apps.]]> 3.66 2024
author: Kyle Chayka
name: S.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
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It's likely been stated a lot, but this should be a must-read--especially if you are trying to remove yourself from Filterworld and its sanitized, homogenized structure.

Filterworld, where every individual is nothing more than a faceless receiver of algorithmic results, and often creates 'content' (because we can't simply make art, we must create 'content' as capitalistic producers) to remain 'important'...at least, until the algorithm chooses something else for other people to pay attention to, possibly for no more than a few brief seconds.

Filterworld, where sources of self validation are found in seeing others as faceless tools of 'engagement.' Filterworld, where we must question whether we truly like a piece of (insert your word of choice here) media, or if we simply are pushed -to- like it because it, and algorithm-decided factors, tell us to do so.

'If you like this, then you'll like that" is often used on social media when promoting various forms of media, and yet all this does is further feed into the algorithms behind Filterworld. These sorts of suggestions, a parroting of how algorithms work in Filterworld, ignore individual taste and preferences.

The author recalls how, when they took a multi-year break from social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, they realized how much they'd previously been posting pictures and comments geared specifically towards an algorithm--suggesting that perhaps they were simply becoming part of it as well, simply by participating in it. Admittedly, I noticed much the same about myself after stopping my personal addiction to Instagram in particular. Less time spent taking pictures not because I necessarily -wanted- to take them, but because I was already trying to imagine how I would crop them -for- the algorithm, how I could create 'engagement' by using the right tags in the right order, by posting at the right time of day and on the right day of the week.

Filterworld is incredibly difficult to escape in this day and age, but we need to do so if at all possible, even in small ways. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a dissection of the homogenization and I'd go so far as to say destruction of connection and culture due to algorithms, particularly those used on social media apps.
]]> 55225045
When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.

But surprises aren’t always good.

Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.

For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .

Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.]]> 545 R.F. Kuang S. 0 to-read 4.16 2018
author: R.F. Kuang
name: S.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 49813770 168 Paul Wallis 1789043875 S. 0 to-read 4.23
author: Paul Wallis
name: S.
average rating: 4.23
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]]> 214152128 Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone�

Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the �if you never owned a bone-sharp biography� / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.�

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.]]> 96 Maria Zoccola 1668046334 S. 0 to-read 4.13 2025
author: Maria Zoccola
name: S.
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 29381976 The first collection to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together



Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry--each animal genetically identical to the next--packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed and shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems, among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a variety of novel influenza variants.

Agribusiness has known for decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together results in a monoculture that selects for such disease. But market economics doesn't punish the companies for growing Big Flu--it punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers. Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge, evolve, and spread with little check. "That is," writes evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, "it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people."

In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid.

While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace's collection appears the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. Highly capitalized agriculture may be farming pathogens as much as chickens or corn.]]> 400 Rob Wallace 1583675892 S. 0 to-read 4.00 2016
author: Rob Wallace
name: S.
average rating: 4.00
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 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 S. 0 to-read 4.01 2016
author: Robert Harris
name: S.
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 127280282 Discover the work of the greatest writer in the English language as you've never encountered it before by ordering internationally renowned actor Dame Judi Dench's SHAKESPEARE: The Man Who Pays The Rent—a witty, insightful journey through the plays and tales of our beloved Shakespeare.

Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig...

Cavorting naked through the Warwickshire countryside painted green...

Acting opposite a child with a pumpkin on his head...

These are just a few of the things Dame Judi Dench has done in the name of Shakespeare.

For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra. In a series of intimate conversations with actor & director Brendan O'Hea, she guides us through Shakespeare's plays with incisive clarity, revealing the secrets of her rehearsal process and inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans.

Interspersed with vignettes on audiences, critics, company spirit and rehearsal room etiquette, she serves up priceless revelations on everything from the craft of speaking in verse to her personal interpretations of some of Shakespeare's most famous scenes, all brightened by her mischievous sense of humour, striking level of honesty and a peppering of hilarious anecdotes, many of which have remained under lock and key until now.

Instructive and witty, provocative and inspiring, this is ultimately Judi's love letter to Shakespeare, or rather, The Man Who Pays The Rent.]]> 400 Judi Dench 1250325773 S. 0 to-read 4.51 2023
author: Judi Dench
name: S.
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 139421
This remarkably edgy and suspenseful tale shows that, despite being better known for his voluminous and sprawling novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master of the more tightly-focused form of the novella.

The Eternal Husband may, in fact, constitute his most classically-shaped composition, with his most devilish plot: a man answers a late-night knock on the door to find himself in a tense and puzzling confrontation with the husband of a former lover—but it isn’t clear if the husband knows about the affair. What follows is one of the most beautiful and piercing considerations ever written about the dualities of love: a dazzling psychological duel between the two men over knowledge they may or may not share, bringing them both to a shattering conclusion.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature’s greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.]]> 137 Fyodor Dostoevsky 097614073X S. 0 to-read 3.87 1870
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: S.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1870
rating: 0
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]]> 33972789 A New York Times bestselling author-illustrator brings readers into the woods to meet two young sisters and a strange bit of magic in this reimagining of the classic but little-known fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red."

Snow and Rose didn't know they were in a fairy tale. People never do....

Once, they lived in a big house with spectacular gardens and an army of servants.

Once, they had a father and mother who loved them more than the sun and moon.

But that was before their father disappeared into the woods and their mother disappeared into sorrow.

This is the story of two sisters and the enchanted woods that have been waiting for them to break a set of terrible spells.

Bestselling author-illustrator Emily Winfield Martin has created a world that sits on the border of enchantment, with characters who are grounded in real emotions that readers will recognize in themselves.]]> 213 Emily Winfield Martin 0553538209 S. 4 4.04 2017
author: Emily Winfield Martin
name: S.
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 200758824
Early morning, 1902. At 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, Eilidh the charlady tips coal into a fire grate and sets it alight. Overhearing, Grimalkin the cat ambles over to curl up against the welcome heat and lick his favorite human's hand. But this is to be his last day on earth…before he becomes the Ghost Cat.

Follow Grimalkin as he witnesses the changes of the next 120 years, prowling unseen among the inhabitants of an Edinburgh tenement while unearthing some startling revelations about the mystery of existence, the unstoppable march of time and the true meaning of feline companionship.]]> Alex Howard S. 3 3.32 2023
author: Alex Howard
name: S.
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 50702014 Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year�

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind�

From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.]]> 366 T. Kingfisher S. 0 to-read 4.09 2020
author: T. Kingfisher
name: S.
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 182506390 Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.]]> 310 John Wiswell 0756418852 S. 0 to-read 3.98 2024
author: John Wiswell
name: S.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 24485148
Gunslinging, chain smoking, Stetson-wearing Taoist psychopomp, Elouise “Lou� Merriwether might not be a normal 19-year-old, but she’s too busy keeping San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si to care much about that. It’s an important job, though most folks consider it downright spooky. Some have even accused Lou of being more comfortable with the dead than the living, and, well� they’re not wrong.

When Lou hears that a bunch of Chinatown boys have gone missing somewhere deep in the Colorado Rockies she decides to saddle up and head into the wilderness to investigate. Lou fears her particular talents make her better suited to help placate their spirits than ensure they get home alive, but it’s the right thing to do, and she’s the only one willing to do it.

On the road to a mysterious sanatorium known as Fountain of Youth, Lou will encounter bears, desperate men, a very undead villain, and even stranger challenges. Lou will need every one of her talents and a whole lot of luck to make it home alive�

From British Fantasy Award nominee Molly Tanzer comes debut novel Vermilion, a spirited weird Western adventure that puts the punk back into steampunk.]]> 376 Molly Tanzer 1939905087 S. 0 currently-reading, dropped 3.56 2015
author: Molly Tanzer
name: S.
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: currently-reading, dropped
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]]> 218674082 Powerful witchcraft. A hunt for sunken treasure. Forbidden love on the high seas. Beware the Amalfi Curse�

Haven Ambrose, a trailblazing nautical archaeologist, has come to the sun-soaked village of Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast. But Haven is hoping to find more than old artifacts beneath the azure waters; she is secretly on a quest to locate a trove of priceless gemstones her late father spotted on his final dive. Upon Haven’s arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister at work?

As Haven searches for her father’s sunken treasure, she begins to unearth a centuries-old tale of ancient sorcery and one woman’s quest to save her lover and her village by using the legendary art of stregheria, a magical ability to harness the ocean. Could this magic be behind Positano’s latest calamities? Haven must unravel the Amalfi Curse before the region is destroyed forever�

Against the dazzling backdrop of the Amalfi Coast, this bewitching novel shimmers with mystery, romance and the untamed magic of the sea.]]> 336 Sarah Penner 0778308006 S. 0 to-read 4.34 2025
author: Sarah Penner
name: S.
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 212426504 A delightfully insightful exploration of our obsession with gossip that weaves together journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, from the host of the massively popular Normal Gossip podcast.

Can you keep a secret? As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that she’d typically collect over drinks with friends.ĚýShe realized she wasn’t the only one missing these little morsels and her hunger for this aspect of normalcy took on a life of its ownĚýandĚýthe blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born.ĚýWith listenership in the millions and gossip quickly becoming her day job, Kelsey found herself with the urge to think more critically about gossip as a form, to better understand the role that it plays in our culture.

In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin and how can we better recognize when gossip is being weaponized against the oppressed? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life because they are a public figure? And how do we even define “gossip,â€� anyway? She dishes on the art of eavesdropping and dives deep into how pop culture has changed the way that we look at hearsay. But as much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture the heart of how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear. With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth â€� and how much the truth really matters in the first place. Ěý]]> 288 Kelsey McKinney 1538757400 S. 0 to-read 3.90 2025
author: Kelsey McKinney
name: S.
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 210401293 From Eric LaRocca—Bram Stoker Award–nominated and Splatterpunk Award–winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke—comes At Dark, I Become Loathsome, a grim yet gentle, horrifying yet hopeful, intense tale of death, trauma, and love.

“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.�

A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought the same—and worse—in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for him—it’s for those he can help. Ashley has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.

Struggling to overcome his own endless grief, one night Ashley finds connection with Jinx—a potential candidate for Ashley’s next ritual—who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating. Thus begins a relationship that traps the two men in an ever-tightening spiral of painful revelations, where long-hidden secrets are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Only through pain can we find healing. Only through death can we find new life.]]> 240 Eric LaRocca S. 0 to-read 3.44 2025
author: Eric LaRocca
name: S.
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 68682 320 Nick Cave 1880985721 S. 0 to-read 3.87 1989
author: Nick Cave
name: S.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> 203579293 Blood of the Old Kings begins an epic adventure in which three strangers journey through a vast Empire that uses the power of dead wizards to conquer and subdue, from award-winning author Sung-il Kim and translated by the highly-acclaimed Anton Hur.

Powered by the corpses of sorcerers, the Empire has conquered the world. It claims to have brought peace and stability to its conquered lands, but some see that peace for what it is—a lie—and will give everything in the fight against it.

Loran is desperate for revenge after the Empire killed her family, so much so that the swordswoman climbs the volcano where the legends say an ancient dragon slumbers and leaps in. She finds that the legends are true, and Loran leaves the mountain with a sword made of dragon’s fang and a great purpose before her.

Cain arrived in the Imperial Capital lost and orphaned, and it’s only thanks to the kindness of a stranger-turned-mentor that he survived on the city’s streets. When his friend is found murdered, he will leave no stone unturned to find those responsible, even if it means starting a war.

Arienne’s future has never been in question—born a sorcerer, she’ll be a Power Generator for the Empire upon her death. But when she starts to hear the voice of a powerful necromancer in her head, she realizes the only thing more terrifying than dying for the Empire is never getting to truly live in the first place.

When peace is a lie, there is power in truth—and as Loran, Cain, and Arienne hunt for answers in their own lives, any one of their small rebellions could be the stone that brings the Empire toppling down.]]> 368 Sung-Il Kim 1250895332 S. 0 to-read 3.75 2016
author: Sung-Il Kim
name: S.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 195607710 The house breathes.

The house contains bodies and secrets.

The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.

It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.

They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.]]> 124 Layla Martínez S. 0 to-read 3.86 2021
author: Layla MartĂ­nez
name: S.
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 34707929 123 Anti Procreation S. 0 to-read 4.29
author: Anti Procreation
name: S.
average rating: 4.29
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 43847278 211 Martin Butler S. 0 to-read 4.30
author: Martin Butler
name: S.
average rating: 4.30
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 12474514
While dying voluntarily is ostensibly legal, suicide attempts and even suicidal thoughts are routinely punished by incarceration in a psychiatric institution. Although many people believe the prevention of suicide is one of the duties the modern state owes its citizens, Szasz argues that suicide is a basic human right and that the lengths to which the medical industry goes to prevent it represent a deprivation of that right.

Drawing on his general theory of the myth of mental illness, Szasz makes a compelling case that the voluntary termination of one’s own life is the result of a decision, not a disease. He presents an in-depth examination and critique of contemporary anti–suicide policies, which are based on the notion that voluntary death is a mental health problem, and systematically lays out the dehumanizing consequences of psychiatrizing suicide prevention.

If suicide be deemed a problem, it is not a medical problem. Managing it as if it were a disease, or the result of a disease, will succeed only in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Pretending to be the pride of medicine, psychiatry is its shame.]]> 160 Thomas Szasz 0815609906 S. 0 to-read 3.95 2011
author: Thomas Szasz
name: S.
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 179888807 48 Dan Dana S. 0 to-read 4.22
author: Dan Dana
name: S.
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 195790632
Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, the Millennial and Gen Z generations are finding it increasingly hard to judge in its favor. What Are Children For? seeks to loosen the grip of the shallow narratives that either lament growing childlessness as a mark of cultural decline, or celebrate it as unambiguous evidence of social progress. Berg and Wiseman explore philosophical and cultural examples of this debate, whether from modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, second-wave feminists in the 1970s, or the current trend of dystopian novels and stories.

In the tradition of Jenny Odell and Amia Srinivasan, Berg and Wiseman write with clear logic and passionate prose to offer those struggling the guidance necessary to move beyond their uncertainty. What Are Children For? concludes that we must embrace the fundamental goodness of human life―not only in theory, but in our everyday lives, and having children can be at the core of that choice.]]> 336 Anastasia Berg 1250276136 S. 0 to-read 3.49
author: Anastasia Berg
name: S.
average rating: 3.49
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 75576052 74 Simon Levin S. 0 to-read 3.00
author: Simon Levin
name: S.
average rating: 3.00
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 25634645 282 David Benatar 0190273119 S. 0 to-read 3.54 2015
author: David Benatar
name: S.
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 2855
E.M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history. He focuses on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science.]]> 186 Emil M. Cioran 1559704640 S. 0 to-read 4.27 1949
author: Emil M. Cioran
name: S.
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> 44245196
The more tools you have at your disposal, the more likely you'll use the right tool for the job � and get it done right.

The same is true when it comes to your thinking. The quality of your outcomes depends on the mental models in your head. And most people are going through life with little more than a hammer.

Until now.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand.

This volume details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, productivity, and how clearly you see the world. You will discover what forces govern the universe and how to focus your efforts so you can harness them to your advantage, rather than fight with them or worse yet� ignore them.

Upgrade your mental toolbox and get the first volume today!]]> 216 Shane Parrish S. 0 to-read 4.05 2018
author: Shane Parrish
name: S.
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 204927599 From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.]]> 528 Yuval Noah Harari 059373422X S. 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: S.
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
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]]> 202468433 In these raucous and poignant short stories, bestselling novelist Zoe Whittall contends with the meaning of desire for both intimacy and danger in a world that questions the validity of femininity and queerness.

In “Oh, El� a dominant woman can’t stop herself from toying with a tender heart. In “Half Pipe� a teen girl’s heterosexual ambivalence gets her in trouble at a skate park. The title story, “Wild Failure,� is about the doomed love between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker trapped in a passionate relationship that might ruin them both—if a mountain lion doesn’t kill them first. Living collectively in a rental house, a group of bisexual roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.� In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet� a femme reflects on her brief stint at a strip club in the 90s when she learns of the death of a regular client. “The Sell-Out" is a satirical look at the role of literary ambition at a time when making a living as an artist has never been more difficult.

Whittall’s characters navigate shame, attachment, and disconnection in this collection of outsider stories. Through playful prose and dark humor, Whittall’s subjects challenge what we mean by a beautiful life in this addition to the genre of outlaw literature.]]> 176 Zoe Whittall 0593499913 S. 4 3.74
author: Zoe Whittall
name: S.
average rating: 3.74
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]]> 36381091
One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what’s going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: "Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world."]]> 272 Paul Tremblay 0062679104 S. 3 to-read 3.31 2018
author: Paul Tremblay
name: S.
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 126918202 Jennifer Thorne skewers all-too-familiar family dynamics in this sly, wickedly funny vacation-Gothic. Beautifully unhinged and deeply satisfying, Diavola is a sharp twist on the classic haunted house story, exploring loneliness, belonging, and the seemingly inescapable bonds of family mythology.

Anna has two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly and survive.

It isn’t easy when she’s the only one in the family who doesn’t quite fit in. Her twin brother, Benny, goes with the flow so much he’s practically dissolved, and her older sister, Nicole, is so used to everyone—including her blandly docile husband and two kids—falling in line that Anna often ends up in trouble for simply asking a question. Mom seizes every opportunity to question her life choices, and Dad, when not reminding everyone who paid for this vacation, just wants some peace and quiet.

The gorgeous, remote villa in tiny Monteperso seems like a perfect place to endure so much family togetherness, until things start going off the rails—the strange noises at night, the unsettling warnings from the local villagers, and the dark, violent past of the villa itself.

(Warning: May invoke feelings of irritation, dread, and despair that come with large family gatherings.)]]> 296 Jennifer Marie Thorne S. 0 to-read 3.85 2024
author: Jennifer Marie Thorne
name: S.
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 36990259 From Dathan Auerbach, the author of the horror sensation Penpal, a hauntingly dark novel about a young boy who goes missing, and the brother who won't stop looking for him.

Eric disappeared when he was three years old. Ben looked away for only a second at the grocery store, but that was all it took. His brother was gone. Vanished into the sticky air of the Florida Panhandle.

Five years later, Ben is still looking for his brother. Still searching, while his stepmother sits and waits and whispers for Eric, refusing to leave the house that Ben's father can no longer afford. Now twenty and desperate for work, Ben takes a job on the night stock crew at the only place that will have the store that blinked Eric out of existence.

Ben can feel there's something wrong there. With the people. With his boss. With the graffitied baler that shudders and groans and beckons. But he's in the right place. He knows the store has much to show him, so he keeps searching. Except Ben misses the most important thing of all.

That he should have stopped looking.]]> 400 Dathan Auerbach S. 0 to-read 3.36 2018
author: Dathan Auerbach
name: S.
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36479412
Just outside of Tokyo lies Aokigahara, a vast forest and one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in Japan...and also the most infamous spot to commit suicide in the world. Legend has it that the spirits of those many suicides are still roaming, haunting deep in the ancient woods.

When bad weather prevents a group of friends from climbing neighboring Mt. Fuji, they decide to spend the night camping in Aokigahara. But they get more than they bargained for when one of them is found hanged in the morning--and they realize there might be some truth to the legends after all.]]> 549 Jeremy Bates S. 0 to-read 3.52 2014
author: Jeremy Bates
name: S.
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 239258 352 Susan Rose Blauner 0060936215 S. 0 to-read 3.84 2002
author: Susan Rose Blauner
name: S.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61195296
“A rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is.� � The New York Times

“If you’re going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know.�

The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn’t die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations.

In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.

The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.]]> 431 Clancy Martin 059331705X S. 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Clancy Martin
name: S.
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 39105401 Ěý
Bering survived. And in addition to relief, the fading of his suicidal thoughts brought curiosity. Where had they come from? Would they return? Is the suicidal impulse found in other animals? Or is our vulnerability to suicide a uniquely human evolutionary development? In Suicidal, Bering answers all these questions and more, taking us through the science and psychology of suicide, revealing its cognitive secrets and the subtle tricks our minds play on us when we’re easy emotional prey. Scientific studies, personal stories, and remarkable cross-species comparisons come together to help readers critically analyze their own doomsday thoughts while gaining broad insight into a problem that, tragically, will most likely touch all of us at some point in our lives. But while the subject is certainly a heavy one, Bering’s touch is light. Having been through this himself, he knows that sometimes the most effective response to our darkest moments is a gentle humor, one that, while not denying the seriousness of suffering, at the same time acknowledges our complicated, flawed, and yet precious existence.
Ěý
Authoritative, accessible, personal, profound—there’s never been a book on suicide like this. It will help you understand yourself and your loved ones, and it will change the way you think about this most vexing of human problems.]]> 275 Jesse Bering 022646332X S. 0 to-read 3.86 2018
author: Jesse Bering
name: S.
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 44326461 A vibrant, compelling memoir that bravely reveals the real-life havoc the depression wreaks and an urgent search for solutions

In her early twenties, while outwardly thriving in her dream job and enjoying warm familial support and a strong social network, award-winning journalist Anna Mehler Paperny found herself trapped by feelings of failure and despair. Her first suicide attempt—ingesting a deadly mix of sleeping pills and antifreeze—landed her in the ICU, followed by weeks of enforced detention. This was Paperny's entry into the labyrinthine psychiatric-care system that provides care to millions of Canadians.

As she struggled to survive the psych ward and as an outpatient, Paperny could not help but turn her demanding journalist's eye on her condition and on the system. She set off on a quest to "know her enemy," interviewing leading practitioners in the field across Canada and the U.S.—from psychiatrists to neurological experts, brain-mapping pioneers to family practitioners, and others dabbling in novel hypotheses. Her memoir opens a window into how we treat (and fail to treat) the disease that accounts for more years swallowed up by disability than any other in the world. She reveals in frank detail her own experiences with the pharmacological pitfalls and side effects of long-term treatment and offers moving case studies of conversations with others.]]> 352 Anna Mehler Paperny 0735272824 S. 0 to-read 3.94 2019
author: Anna Mehler Paperny
name: S.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 61286907 Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes.

Eight stories of literary dark fiction from a master storyteller. Exploring the shadow side of love, these are tales of grief, obsession, control. Intricate examinations of trauma and tragedy in raw, poetic prose. In these narratives, a woman imagines horrific scenarios whilst caring for her infant niece; on-line posts chronicle a cancer diagnosis; a couple in the park with their small child encounter a stranger with horrific consequences; a toxic relationship reaches a terrifying resolution�

Originally published under the title The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, this is a much-praised collection of deeply unsettling, painfully dark tales.]]> 205 Eric LaRocca 1803363002 S. 0 to-read 3.69 2021
author: Eric LaRocca
name: S.
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 204642427 A mindbending and visceral experimental horror about a young man trapped in an infinite Montreal subway station, perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski and Susanna Clarke.

Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.

Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.

The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.

A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.]]> 139 Sofia Ajram 1803369620 S. 0 to-read 3.10 2024
author: Sofia Ajram
name: S.
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 62883181
You won’t need a dial-up connection to reach the beyond in this time-warp to the �90s. With undead grunge rock icons, menacing action figures, family sitcoms gone very wrong, and more: these terror tales will return you to the end of the old millennium.

How will you get back?
Like, who says you will?]]> 293 Chelsea Pumpkins S. 0 to-read 3.95 2023
author: Chelsea Pumpkins
name: S.
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 75405592
From the blood of Macbeth and the ghosts of Hamlet, to the dark fantasy of The Tempest and the twisted love of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare Unleashed reimagines the Bard’s greatest works as short horror stories…as well as horror sonnets.

With new stories by Joe R. Lansdale & Kasey Lansdale, Ian Doescher, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Lee Murray, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gemma Files, Tim Waggoner, John Palisano, Lisa Morton, Gene Flynn, Hailey Piper, Philip Fracassi, Gwendolyn Kiste, and others.

Dark sonnets by Linda D. Addison, Alessandro Manzetti, Jessica McHugh, Sara Tantlinger, Stephanie M. Wytovich, and Lucy A. Snyder, among others.

And an introduction by Weston Ochse.

Proudly represented by both Crystal Lake Publishing and Monstrous Books.]]> 382 James Aquilone S. 0 to-read 4.04
author: James Aquilone
name: S.
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 206768687 The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played “The Thin Kid� is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?

Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful twist on the “cursed film� that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.]]> Paul Tremblay 0063070049 S. 4
Horror is not merely contained to the existence of literal monsters, and those who expect such will no doubt be disappointed by this title--as will those who are expecting a *reliable* narrator and clear cut, black & white motivations for characters.

Horror Movie excels in the spaces found between binary modes of descriptive horror, and I found this tale compelling and disturbing. Given how the story flips from past to present, to the script of the original movie itself (and the modern remake,) I would definitely recommend getting a copy of the audiobook as opposed to reading it via a physical copy, as the format it's written in really shines in the audio production.]]> 3.27 2024
author: Paul Tremblay
name: S.
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/12
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Phenomenal production for the audiobook version of this title! The narration was engaging, and other than a few breaks here and there, I was compelled to finish Horror Movie in one day.

Horror is not merely contained to the existence of literal monsters, and those who expect such will no doubt be disappointed by this title--as will those who are expecting a *reliable* narrator and clear cut, black & white motivations for characters.

Horror Movie excels in the spaces found between binary modes of descriptive horror, and I found this tale compelling and disturbing. Given how the story flips from past to present, to the script of the original movie itself (and the modern remake,) I would definitely recommend getting a copy of the audiobook as opposed to reading it via a physical copy, as the format it's written in really shines in the audio production.
]]> 197681496 During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale.

January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?

November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with an enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter—each of them grievously wounded. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.

As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.

11 hrs. 39 min.]]> 12 Katherine Arden 0593790847 S. 3 3.77 2024
author: Katherine Arden
name: S.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> 207567782 For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, this strange and sexy novel of queer love in a small town is an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life are monsters ready to possess us all.

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

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

As the monstrous force grows bolder, it infiltrates Angelina’s life. It talks with her dog’s mouth; it guzzles on her memories; it controls Angelina from the inside. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it � the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak, and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?]]> 304 Mikaella Clements 153874225X S. 0 to-read 3.89 2024
author: Mikaella Clements
name: S.
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> 201632539 In this emotionally raw and propulsive folk horror-mystery, a journalist goes to a small town and unravels a dark secret that the women have been keeping for generations.

Marshall is still trying to put the pieces together after the death of her husband. After she is involved in a terrible accident, her editor sends her to the small, backwards town of Raeford to investigate a clearly ridiculous rumor: that a horse has given birth to a healthy, human baby boy.

When Marshall arrives in Raeford, she finds an insular town that is kinder to the horses they are famous for breeding than to their own people. But when two horribly mangled bodies are discovered in a field—one a horse, one a human—she realizes that there might be a real story here.

As she’s pulled deeper into the town and its guarded people, her sense of reality is tipped on its head. Is she losing her grip? Or is this impossible story the key to a dark secret that has haunted the women of Raeford for generations?

Unbearably tense and utterly gripping, this atmospheric tale of female rage, bodily autonomy, and generational trauma hails the arrival of a masterful storyteller.]]> 320 Leslie J. Anderson 1683694295 S. 0 to-read 3.32 2024
author: Leslie J. Anderson
name: S.
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> 60291036 Winner of the Stoker Award and named one of the 100 Best Novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly, Dark Harvest is a powerhouse thrill-ride with all the resonance of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.

Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town. He's willing to risk everything, including his life, to be a winner for once. But before the night is over, Pete will look into the saw-toothed face of horror � and discover the terrifying true secret of the October Boy…]]> 5 Norman Partridge 1250252962 S. 3 3.38 2006
author: Norman Partridge
name: S.
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 10919079 115 Andrew Mayne S. 3 3.79 2011
author: Andrew Mayne
name: S.
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 213870075 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, aĚýdreamlike, genre-defying novelĚýabout a professor andĚýdetective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.�

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cutsĚýon the bodies of the victims—a word which, in Spanish, is always feminineâ€�Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the professor’s classroom into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.]]> 320 Cristina Rivera Garza 0593737008 S. 0 to-read 3.01 2007
author: Cristina Rivera Garza
name: S.
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 36436073 'To create today is to create dangerously'

Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot in this powerful speech, accompanied here by two others.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 58 Albert Camus 024133912X S. 0 to-read 3.84 1957
author: Albert Camus
name: S.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 1202
These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.
(front flap)]]> 268 Steven D. Levitt 0061234001 S. 0 to-read 4.01 2005
author: Steven D. Levitt
name: S.
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 11468377 Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.]]> 499 Daniel Kahneman 0374275637 S. 0 to-read 4.17 2011
author: Daniel Kahneman
name: S.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 122767706 "Are you tired of feeling stuck in your life? Do you constantly find yourself making the same mistakes and falling into the same patterns of self-sabotage? It's time to take control of your life and unfuck yourself.

In this powerful and emotive book, you'll discover the tools and techniques you need to break free from negative patterns and habits, and find inner peace and happiness. Through a journey of self-discovery and self-liberation, you'll learn how to love and accept yourself, and transform your mindset to achieve your true potential.

With practical tips, this book is your guide to unlocking the power of self-empowerment and taking the first step towards a better you. Whether you're struggling with anxiety, or depression, or simply feel unfulfilled in your life, this book will show you how to unfuck yourself and find the happiness and fulfillment you deserve.
HIT THE BUY BUTTON TO HAVE A COPY OF THIS BOOK. ]]> 42 David Welter S. 0 to-read 3.58
author: David Welter
name: S.
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 12287209
Or you'll get what you wish for.]]> 56 Hugh Howey S. 3 4.14 2012
author: Hugh Howey
name: S.
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/05/12
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 991413
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.]]> 317 ˛Ń´Ç±ôľ±Ă¨°ů±đ 014044730X S. 0 to-read 4.03 1666
author: ˛Ń´Ç±ôľ±Ă¨°ů±đ
name: S.
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1666
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> 378161 122 George K. Simon Jr. 096516960X S. 0 to-read 4.00 1996
author: George K. Simon Jr.
name: S.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52879375 In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut.

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Lush and richly imagined, a tale of impossible journeys, unforgettable love, and the enduring power of stories awaits in Alix E. Harrow's spellbinding debut--step inside and discover its magic.]]> 400 Alix E. Harrow 0316421979 S. 0 to-read 4.04 2019
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: S.
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 40071317
In space, no one can hear you meow.

This full-color, illustrated book offers a cat's eye view of all the action from the movie Alien. With new and original artwork by artist Rory Lucey, this is the perfect gift for all Alien fans (and cat lovers).]]> 80 Rory Lucey 178565926X S. 0 to-read 4.47
author: Rory Lucey
name: S.
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> 58830202 Hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface, a graveyard waits...

Years ago, the SS Arcadia vanished without a trace during a routine voyage. Though a strange, garbled emergency message was broadcast, neither the ship nor any of its crew could be found. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course...a silent graveyard deep beneath the ocean's surface, eagerly waiting for the first sign of life.

Cove and her dive team have been granted permission to explore the Arcadia's rusting hull. Their purpose is straightforward: examine the wreck, film everything, and, if possible, uncover how and why the supposedly unsinkable ship vanished.

But the Arcadia has not yet had its fill of death, and something dark and hungry watches from below. With limited oxygen and the ship slowly closing in around them, Cove and her team will have to fight their way free of the unspeakable horror now desperate to claim them.

Because once they're trapped beneath the ocean's waves, there's no going back.]]> 469 Darcy Coates 1728220238 S. 0 to-read 3.94 2022
author: Darcy Coates
name: S.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
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When their daughter, Margot, inherits the family business, she wants nothing to do with it. The winery is valued for its unparalleled produce, but it's built on a field where hundreds of convicts were once hanged, and the locals whisper morbid rumors. They say the ground is cursed.

It's been more than a decade since Margot last saw her childhood home. But now that she's alone in the sprawling, dilapidated building, she begins to believe the curse is more than real―and that she may be the next victim of the house that never rests...]]> 377 Darcy Coates S. 0 to-read 3.84 2022
author: Darcy Coates
name: S.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
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Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the Watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans—and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn't reach the bunker in time.

Afraid and trapped among strangers, Mina is desperate for answers. Who are the Watchers? Why are these creatures keeping them imprisoned? And, most importantly, how can she escape?]]> 310 A.M. Shine 1801102120 S. 0 to-read 3.83 2021
author: A.M. Shine
name: S.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
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]]> 30653712 Pawn Stars.

Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn’t been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer’s Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing, and makes clear that we’ve succeeded despite ourselves. Rare-book expert Rebecca Romney and author J. P. Romney take us from monasteries and museums to auction houses and libraries to introduce curious episodes in the history of print that have had a profound impact on our world.

Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on it. Today, Johannes Gutenberg is recognized as the father of Western printing. But for the first few hundred years after the invention of the printing press, no one knew who printed the first book. This long-standing mystery took researchers down a labyrinth of ancient archives and libraries, and unearthed surprising details, such as the fact that Gutenberg’s financier sued him, repossessed his printing equipment, and started his own printing business afterward. Eventually the first printed book was tracked to the library of Cardinal Mazarin in France, and Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible was finally credited to him, thus ensuring Gutenberg’s name would be remembered by middle-school students worldwide.]]> 384 Rebecca Romney 0062412310 S. 0 to-read 3.78 2017
author: Rebecca Romney
name: S.
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
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